I have no idea what a newspaper would charge for similar exposure, but I can tell you that at $1 per day, I'm often paying more money than I'm making from my site.

For comparison, six months ago I was reaching nearly 100% of my followers each week and each post would easily be seen by 500 people no matter what. It's been an absolutely catastrophic drop-off.

Well the way products usually work is the company says "pay me this amount and here is what you'll get". The way Facebook works is "Pay me... no, a bit more. Maybe a bit more. No, there's no guarantee of what you'll get in return. Don't like it? Pay a bit more then." The relationship between content creators and Facebook is a partnership. Facebook wouldn't be worth anything without users, and users would have a smaller audience without Facebook. The last thing you want is for that to tip too far in one direction.

Have you ever used Facebook ads? They're not exactly straightforward, and there's no "pay this amount to reach everyone who says they want to read your content". You can excuse their exploitative business model all you want, but it only works until there's a viable alternative.