Not really, he is paying for good quality content. But the content itself is not what is making the money. The traffic reading the content is where the revenue is generated. His trick to generating traffic is to pay for high-quality content, and then he executes an SEO link building campaign, and pay for some advertising. Unless the writer also wants to do the SEO part, and also pay for ads, his writing is kind of worthless.

If you've ever tried to execute a link building campaign, you'd quickly realize it's VERY difficult.