This article is valid in regard to Academia in certain aspects, the most shocking is asking authors of short 1,500 articles to "pay" $500 towards Academia's "costs" to proceed to publication. Obviously, aside from tech costs, as the system is fully automated, these are minimal, and clearly not that amount. The "reviewers" work for free. However, that said, on Academia letters the "views" are startlingly more robust (once published) than on plain old Academia. If you get 100 views on Academia, you might expect 10,000 views on Academia letters. However, you need to recover the $500 so indeed you need something more to "sell" than just your prestige.