Most people are obsessed with regular payments, and truth be told if a pool goes a long time without finding a block and the difficulty keeps rising, then you are losing money on that pool, even if it has no fee. Pools need to be above a minimum size to be feasible, and this pool has fallen below that size. Once it's below a certain size, more and more people leave it. Conversely when a pool is above a certain size, more and more people join it. It's a vicious cycle that once you're beyond the event horizon there's nothing you can do. Advertising and getting in early and fancy features are the only thing that attract miners when establishing a base, and this pool has none of those. It missed its chance of becoming big a long time ago, and it's not likely to ever recover now. I'm keeping it running as a service to the community now, but I don't have much hope for its future.