This is the band where a placement pays for itself through relevance instead of reach: 14k visits, most of them arriving from long-tail queries.
There is a second job these placements do that is worth naming: they make a young or thin profile look normal. A domain that acquires 35-level links from a spread of ordinary publications, in drips, over months, looks like a business that has been around. A domain that acquires forty links from aggressive networks in a fortnight looks like a campaign, and it is the pattern rather than the individual link that gets noticed.
Within the General section of the index — 1,576 listings, 39 median DA, 5k median traffic, $70 median price — this placement is within a few percent of the median on cost and about 2.5× the index median on audience. Listings in that section range from $30 at the cheap end, so the question is not whether $70 is high for a link, but whether it is high for this one.
General-interest publications are the workhorses of a link profile and the easiest place to overpay. The article shape that works is boringly specific: a problem, the method used, what happened, what it cost. A general title with 14k monthly visits survives because it answers questions well, not because it loves contributors, so a piece with nothing verifiable in it gets edited down to a bio link.
Our observation on this host is do-follow outbound links in editorial content. That is the attribute, not the value: the 35 DA and 14k monthly visits are what the attribute is attached to.