: How Do Online Sites Afford Writers? How do online publications afford to pay writers 20-50$ per written article?

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At about .80 per thousand impressions, eight display ads per page will break even if the article gets a thousand views. And there are ad campaigns costing much more, sponsored articles, and so on - that brings even more revenue.

And then, any publication will rarely exceed 10% of own content. Most of it will be purchased from news agencies (in bulk, so the price per article is considerably lower), press materials received from entities that want the publicity, material copied from other sources (anywhere from long-term content exchange contracts, through "digests", to outright plagiarism), content they are paid to publish (articles with desired slant), and so on, and so forth.

So, even if "own writers" technically cost the publisher more than they allow to rake in directly, they are kept for the prestige - a Journal / Newspaper is more prestigious title than "News aggregation site" - and their publications can be resold to other outlets.

Never mind "Premium articles" that require a paid subscription.

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