Jerry, thank you so much for this break down.
I have been considering for a while now that the steem payout system isn't quite the right way to incentivize good long-term content. But it is a start and we are having fun!
I continually have to remind myself that I blog for myself, not for others, and not for upvotes. Its just that the crypto-rewards are so nice we can sometimes forget.
With considering long term content, the 7 day payout is definitely not ideal compared to YouTube for example which has ad revenue for all views the entire way. At the same time, I am not sure what kind of simple fix we could apply to allow upvotes on older posts also?
What I have noticed both as a reader and author that when I find a post I love that is older, I often will instead vote the newer posts up by that author. While this makes it confusing in terms of "why did my post about this get so many upvotes while others got less" the system is functioning to reward posts created a long time ago by getting new upvotes today. I often set authors on @steemvoter after finding much older posts I love to reward ongoing creation.
maybe a good way to go would be as @ecoinstant says to turn older posts into a faucet. But don't look at te upvotes anymore, but look at the views in stead.
I completely agree with your comment above, @ecoinstant. Out of millions of websites on the web, Steemit is currently ranked at 2,128 globally as per Alexa, and 1,458 in the US. This means that Steemit's power to pull in traffic is much more than many others in various niches. Inferring from Jerry's post, a blogger in the gardening niche, for example, has much higher chances of having his content seen on his blog on Steemit, than if it were on his own domain.
If you have good content in your niche, over the long term you will have many more followers by virtue of your content being posted on Steemit. So the "payout" could be considered in the form of having more followers over the long term, rather than the SBD and Steem payouts that are icing and cherry on top of the cake!
How about allowing the poster to set a 7-30 day slider for payout? What do you think? Would that work well?
To that I can only speculate, but knowing something about incentives I would suspect that if we want to incentivize more content like Jerry suggests, long-term useful information, old posts would need to become something like a faucet, they won't pay much but can still generate something for the author.