Jacob, you are conflating a couple of things in my comment.

So there is "RPM" for a web site and there is RPM for a web page. No doubt you run analytics on your site to track who goes to which pages and which pages generate the most advertising revenue. In my experience the "landing" page gets a lot of traffic, the "spokes" pages (typically branches to a bunch of related content) come next, and then there are the articles, some of which get a lot of traffic and some which get only a few page views a day/week. You also probably track dwell time so that you can recognize people who land on the page, probably from a Search engine result, and then "bounce" off because it wasn't what they wanted. Or stay and read. Or the unicorn of the bunch, stay, read, and then read a bunch of other pages.

I've also been an author in both the print and web world, my columns on JavaWorld continue to get page views and I continue to get various folks popping over to my poorly maintained web site to grab a copy of the sources. While I'm sure there are probably people who have read my BYTE and Dr. Dobbs articles that is harder to track long term.

The point being that I'm pretty familiar with the space and if you're looking for median values for revenue for a given article, its "large" and it became small enough to result in folks like Dr. Dobbs dropping out entirely. Web page revenue, which generally represents one article for a journalist, is "good" if it has $3 RPMs and that is super great if it is getting a lot of traffic.

Number 2, the web is often times "one and done" for articles, not web sites but web articles. So if you're a journalist or an author that has a loyal following, folks will come back and read new articles that appear, but they don't generally read the same article again and again.[1] Given that you're running a site, and no doubt you have analytics on that site, how many times does the same person come back to an article? What is the 25th, 50th, and 99th percentiles? If you're 99th percentile breaks 1.15 I'm going to be super impressed.

So lets unpack #3, the money shot (no pun intended)

Lets start with your writer who was paid $100 to create an article[2]. Setting aside the unreality of someone doing their best work in 4 hours, you have to consider how information gets "value" to consumers, there really is only a few ways, it's "rare" (which means few alternate sources), it's "timely" (which means alternate sources don't have it yet), or it's "enriched" (which means the information contributes to a bigger understanding). So how much value is your author creating here? Do they have the inside scoop on a big deal? Or maybe they are the first with the complete picture, or maybe they have been following a topic for years and can put it all in perspective for people just coming into contact with this thing or concept. That is what creates value in the piece. If they are paraphrasing an AP press release? (or any press release for that matter), or adding a bit of irrelevant trivia to a bigger story, or regurgitating something which has been covered by 16 other authors already in different ways, there is very little in the way of "value" in that writing.

Information can demand a price commensurate with its value. While people complain that the NYTimes is a "paywall" they have reached 1M digital subscribers today. Those are people who have paid them money because they expect the value of the information they will get out of the NYTimes will be high relative to the price.

So let us look a bit critically at your numbers. "They would need 30k readers to pay 1/3 of a cent in order to break even just on the cost of the article. That is absolutely insane and impossible for most articles."

Fred Langa, who was the Editor-in-Chief at BYTE advised me as follows when I wrote for him, "Chuck, the idea article for us would interest all our readers, but that only rarely happens, you should shoot for being interesting to 1/2 to 3/4ths of the readership." Their subscription base was a couple of million readers, so that was targeting 1.5M people.

There are over a billion people who use the Web today, a large fraction get most of their information from it. If you're unable to get 30K page views for an article, then I would suggest that either the information it contained was not valuable, or that nobody knew of its existence.

The second thing working in your favor today is that the Web never forgets. If you want to read an article of mine in BYTE you have either find a reprint or find some kind soul who has scanned it into the web. But if it was online to begin with (like my Javaworld columns) then people find them again and again and again. Some of those have over 5 million page views. And that is over 20 years. So you write something today, and then it can live forever for pennies a day (a Digital Ocean web server to serve it up is $5/month which can be amortized over all the things you are keeping alive on the web).

If you're going to write on the web to make money, make it something worthwhile to a million people. Not three or four thousand. If you are just passionate about something feel free to spend all your time writing about it, that is its own reward and any remuneration is just bonus.

[1] The exception for fan fiction is noted.

[2] I don't think that would be a particularly good investment in time unless someone was just passionate about what they are writing about.