Have you ever worked as a writer?

With things like Patreon tied to another content creation service, people make way more than people make on Steem. Ads suck, but between ads and affiliate links you can do okay.

Also, you'd be surprised how many blogs have outsourced writing. Any small news site is going to be paying writers, as are a ton of company and media sites. $10 is the starving college kid pay, too. You can make more if you really get an audience.

Also, you can't eat off of exposure. I don't even know that you're correct about how well Steem draws traffic, because it's impossible to tell the reader/upvote ratio, but I actually suspect that I generally have a smaller readership than upvotes due to bots that are trying to snipe curation rewards and curation trails. Steem links may get some search results. Even then, after seven days your benefit for any content you've posted is gone (and I know there are ways to work around this, but they're not super user-friendly).

Steem's promise was as a way to achieve independence.

I've earned more in five hours of freelance writing than I've earned for several hundred posts on Steem (I've invested money in Steem too, though I always bought super low so I'm not in pain due to the low value). 

Now, that's exceptional because it was a twenty-cents-a-word situation, which is basically the skies opening up and raining money, but I could be pulling down a lot more money off Steem than on. The only reason I'm here is for the freedom, and I'm not even sure that's worth it.