Your nodes will begin storing data (that you’re paid for) from the moment you start them: even unvetted. Payouts are sent to your ETH address within the first few days of the month (usually around the 3rd or 4th). So if you started your nodes a couple weeks ago, you’ll probably see you earned something in the next couple days (and often a forum post like this).
However… you do need to earn enough value in tokens to greatly exceed the ETH fees required to send them. If you haven’t earned enough… it will keep adding up until the next month… you also see this in your Node UI And the first nine months nodes have some held-back earnings.
Basically you don’t reach 100% monthly payouts until you’re past those nine months BUT you do get all of them if you run long enough to graceful-exit when you leave.
Revenue is mostly based on how much data you store… and although Storj will try to spread it over many-nodes-behind-the-same-IP… there’s no guarantee: so sharing nodes will still grow at different rates.