Do they all pay roughly that same amount?
No. When I started for Weinterrupt I was getting 4$ per article but I've been writing there for two years and they increase my $/post regularly. I get a bonus whenever the article gets a pingback (or linkback) from another site but it's like .50$ per linkback and it barely ever happens.
Last year all the writers got a 20$ Christmas bonus. It's not much but I think the owner of the site was cool for at least doing that.
Note that as far as I know, other than the owners, I'm the one that has lasted the longest writing for those two sites and yes, some days it's a pain in the ass to have to post an article but most of the time it's really fun to write, it's those articles as well as the music and one-liners that have helped me gather the Twitter crowd I have.
Twitter BTW is a weird world. Sometimes I tweet something idiotic like last night about the Asian kid, and will gain like 100 followers in one evening.
Other times I'll tweet something without thinking about it too much and drop 2000 followers in 15 minutes like last spring when the Devils eliminated Philly in the playoffs and I tweeted "Damn you NJ Devils..." (I had philly in my playoff pool) and lost everyone that was a Devils fan.
Yeah, because you get fucking raped everytime you try to transfer it to your bank account too.
That's true, it's a 5$ flat fee so transferring like 100$ is not really worth it + it takes 7-10 days because CANADA. What really pisses me off is that you can't pay back your credit card with Paypal, that would be awesome but it's not available in Canada either, unless you use a prepaid card and even then, there's the usual 5$ fee.
Paypal is definitely there to make money.