A 37 DA listing at $80 is the price of an experiment: if the article earns citations, you have found a channel; if not, you have lost one invoice.
Titles in this group are usually run by small teams with high volume, so turnaround depends on their queue rather than on your brief. A short, tightly edited 700-900 word contribution with one link and a named author clears desks that would reject a 2,000-word marketing essay with four.
Within the News & Media section of the index — 88 listings, 40 median DA, 31.3k median traffic, $75 median price — this placement is 7% above the median on cost and about 3.8× the index median on audience. Listings in that section range from $35 at the cheap end, so the question is not whether $80 is high for a link, but whether it is high for this one.
News sites are the hardest place to earn a body link and the easiest place to earn a mention. Editorial staff strip links from contributions more often than any other publisher type, and the ones that survive are the links that carry a source, a figure or a document a reader might want. Build the piece around something citable and a link stops looking like a favour.
The index lists this property's editorial links as followed. Availability of a followed link changes with the site's monetisation decisions, so we confirm the tag on the live URL before counting delivery.