How often are payouts made from this pool? Is it only after a block has been found?
That is correct.
Wow, how can anyone afford to miner here? I mean, the design seems great - but at this point with once per year payouts - that's rough. Too bad there isn't some sort of marketing campaign to get a lot of people to jump on all at once the get the blocks coming in faster. It looks like it was doing pretty well at one point - if the payouts were less all the fees usually involved, what prompted people to pull their miners elsewhere? That's a shame.
Well, the irony is that a zero fee pool leaves more profit than those 4% fee PPS pools, and if enough hashrate was added to this pool, payments could become as frequent as daily, and with such frequency variance cease to matter. But that requires some petahashes per second to move here, rather than, remaining at the usual Chinese pools.
As you can see "little fish" can't change this situation much. I suppose that the interface and pool help needs to be available in both Chinese and Russian...
Marketing requires money, but a zero fee pool doesn't make any on its own...