Did you notice maybe today how suddenly your posts seem to have lost a few pennies or even a few dollars from where they were standing previously? It's a bit odd seeing your earnings suddenly shave some weight, especially when on the higher end you could be seeing differences of hundreds of dollars.
I'll give you an example:
Here's my latest post when I took a screenshot in the morning time
And here it is shortly later on in the day..
It fluctuated from $350+ to nearly $340. Do you want to know why?
I've seen a lot of new users curious about this, so don't worry, for this is something everybody first gets nervous with when they're just exploring Steemit. There's a lot of things rushing through your mind when you join, and some thoughts are probably stressing on whether or not this site even is legitimate. Once you start posting and realize that you're making real money, you get excited and a little emotional. This is usually good, but then every little detail that goes a bit awry, you take extreme notice. You CANNOT get emotional though, as this will lead to your downfall and limit your success on this platform.
See that image up above? It's Steem's price on Poloniex, a cryptocurrency exchange where you're able to trade your Steem and SBD for BTC or ETH. If you trade, you're most likely familiar with the range of prices a cryptocurrency (or stock) can go through in just a few hours. It's extremely volatile, and some of the more heart-based trades lead to big losses. Anyways, people get excited and through good periods the price may go up. Through bad periods, it may fall drastically and then go on a wild roller coaster ride. It doesn't matter where it goes on a day to day basis, unless you are trading in such a world. Even weekly rates shouldn't apply, as if you're a long term investor you're focused more on the monthly or yearly results.
If you look at Steem's price over the past month, it's looking nice:
Personally I find Steem to be more stable than BTC and plenty of other coins out there, so I don't mind having a decent sized portfolio chunk of it. So the prices fly all over the board, and Steemit is closely tied to this. Basically for every penny you earn, it's revolving around how much Steem Power and SBD you'll receive. Since the price of Steem and SBD do change often, and there's a 7 day delay with payouts (which is good in my opinion, helps you make more in the long run I think) the payouts are subject to change. Give or take a little. During bearish periods, you may lose a few bucks. During bull runs, you'll gain a fair amount.
To the long term investor or content creator, this has little affect. Do you know what really matters? Traffic. And with the amount of users going up each month, and the interest in Steem and Steemit, I think it's fair to say the price of Steem will generally go up over the next few months. So forget about studying the exact earnings you make on every post, and focus more on how to grow your profile and getting more posts out there :)
As the prices move around a lot, most likely any money you "lost" before the payout will be made up as each day you can see differences. As I said, worry more so about creating than the actual earning ;) They're both correlated anyways.
BTW, first person to tell me how many subscribers I currently have on my YT channel gets a 100% upvote.
https://www.youtube.com/c/AVILSD