Posts must be in the 50th percentile of all posts by relevance score in order to payout. If not in the top 50th percentile they will always pay 0 no matter how much is bet/staked. It pays to ONLY stake on the BEST content and to ignore spam or low-quality content.
See Also Below:
Why are you getting a small REL return?
1) You are not staking much REL (more staked pays more).
2) You are not staking early enough (the first to stake gets dramatically more of a return than later bets).
3) You are betting on low relevance posts (a post MUST be in top 50% of relevance in order to pay out).
4) You are betting on posts where a lot of REL has been bet (lower proportions of shares pay lower).
5) You are up voting posts after 3 days (after the staking period closes there is no payout on up votes).
6) You are upvoting without staking (unless you stake/bet your REL you will not get a return).
7) You have no REL to stake (you need to have REL in your account).
8) You are staking in a low-bet community (the community in which you stake matters).
9) You are not down voting obvious spam (the system factors in total up and down votes in several metrics).
10) You are posting irrelevant posts which will decrease your REP and decrease your ability to sway outcomes.
11) There are more active members staking in a given period of time (payout factors in relative bet activity).
12) Doing something else of which I am unaware (attempts to manipulate the system or generally other unhelpful things).
(some related info)
Number of raw votes is NOT the same as reputation rating (hover over the vote count on an actual desktop to see the reputation score). A post could have 1,000 0 REP members up vote it and it still be very low scoring or 5 99 REP members up vote it and be very high scoring. All votes are not equal.
Beyond that, timing, amount bet, and bet location matter. Earlier bets, larger bets, larger proportions of bets, and communities with more bets matter.
Even beyond all of that, if a post is not above the 50th percentile on relevance score (no matter how many up votes or how much staked on it), the payout will ALWAYS be 0.
All of this information is already available on the platform, though I do not know if it is all directly spelled out in the same place. In the White Paper you can get the rough idea of the process and several of the blog posts spell out the mathematics and mechanics in more detail.
The amount of shares you get for each bet is determined by this formula:
yourShares = 1/2 * (currentBets + yourBet) ^2 - currentShares
So to get the 1st share you would need to stake .5 tokens. 2nd share would be more 'expensive' and require 1.5, 3rd share would require 2.5, and so on.
The payout is split among all share holders of the post based on how many shares they hold.
Each additional person to stake will both dilute the rewards pool and add to it, though the later they are in staking the more ‘expensive’ a share, so the more they will have to pay for a comparable stake. They may also make the pool much more likely to pay out depending on their REP.
Choose wisely how you deploy your bets as you will need to bet on good, relevant, content in order for the payout to happen, but by the time you can be certain of a payout, the potential reward will be really small for the same amount staked or considerably more expensive to achieve the same payout as others who staked before you.