“Assume an editor pays a writer $100. Taking as a random decent example a $5 CPM, the piece would need 20,000 pageviews to make that $100. That doesn’t take into account the editor’s salary, the salaries of any developers, or any other costs beyond getting letters into a Word document. (In particular, the people selling the ads tend to get paid more than all the rest of those people.) In any event, a person can’t afford to do much reporting or spend too much time writing if he or she is only getting $100 a story and planning to make a living. The likelihood of that story breaking out in any meaningful way is pretty low.”