I used to write for a tiny outfit that scraped together a few thousand dollars a month in revenue and paid me ~$50 for 1000 word articles. They were approached

I used to write for a tiny outfit that scraped together a few thousand dollars a month in revenue and paid me ~$50 for 1000 word articles. They were approached almost daily being offered low $xxx figures to publish articles with backlinks for SEO purposes (which they refused). And this was a site with a few hundred pages of content and less than 100k uniques a month. On that kind of scale, a backlink from the Atlantic would presumably be worth thousands of dollars.