Gameology: Commentary and Resources for the Game Studies Community

Greetings, everyone. I know that many of the folks here have a great deal more experience than I do at getting paid freelance work, so I just thought I'd ask a basic question: How much can anyone expect to earn writing game-related articles for commercial websites and online mags? I'm trying to figure out what constitutes a fair price, and whether I'm just working for peanuts when I could turn this hobby into a nice sideline. I did some internet research and came up with the figure of 50 cents a word, which seems far more than I expected--I've been receiving somewhere between 1-5 cents per word and considered that lucky. Can anyone give me more info on this? I realize that writing these types of articles is more a labor of love than anything else, but is it really true that there's just no money in this biz?