How liquid are those earnings? Can they be withdrawn easily and converted to BTC/USD?

The earnings are in the form of Steem Power, Steem,and steem dollars. The latter was apparently an attempt to make a stable currency, which tracked the dollar, which failed to live up to its goals.

Steem power is very illiquid and takes time to "power down" the steem power into steem. Steem is the main currency, which you trade on the markets (along with Steem dollars).

Yes, although about 50% of the payout amount in the default case is in the form of Steem Power, which takes ~12 weeks to convert to STEEM which can be instantly traded like any other coin.

Delay aside, it’s all the author’s.

cumulatively or is that how much they're earning per month?

It's how much they've earned for that particular video so far. I've been saying it for a while here but nobody seemed to listen. d.tube is way better for smaller creators than YouTube is right now, and with a tiny fraction of YouTube's audience.

Plus, YouTube is only going to get worse for small creators, as Google tries to cater more and more to the big companies and punish the creators for "advertiser-offensive content". Meanwhile, d.tube should get better and better as both it and STEEM (the tipping mechanism) rise in popularity.

The nice part is the creators don't even have to give-up YouTube to try out d.tube. They can just upload the video to both and see for themselves what's the difference.

With a new monetised platform, with money being incredibly obvious on the UI, the incentive is pretty high to just steal popular content from YouTube and repost it. How do they ensure original content or ownership?

They don't. People are going to get screwed and sued over this.

If Facebook doesn't care about enforcing copyright, why should such a small website?

That really seems like an argument that is made only to hurt startups.

> That really seems like an argument that is made only to hurt startups.

you're looking at this the wrong way. Yes, startups should enforce copyright. But so should facebook.

They just get away with it because they are big

Yes, that's the point the commenter is making.

>How do they ensure original content or ownership?

This has become a big issue on the STEEM blockchain - plagirism, irrelevant junk etc.

Generally the STEEM blockchain is otherwise very fast and healthy but the content issue putting it strain from every front.

Automated AI algorithms, some day.

how is an "AI algorithm" going to figure out a newly uploaded video is a dupe of a Youtube video that is in the process of trending? How would you effectively contentID every single popular video on Youtube and run it against a fully distributed video platform? Just magical AI things I guess?

contentID sort of thing is actually possible - I am actually working on a proof of concept AI bot to identify spam and plagiarism.

some basic info is here : https://steemit.com/hello/@thefreebird/init-1

My impression is that it is all within the first 20 days after posting,

but I haven't looked into it closely and could easily be remembering incorrectly or have misunderstood.

You can only earn the first seven days after the post was created.

If you create something that has a lasting appeal you should repost it every X days.. Sounds dumb.