All this has nothing to do ROI, which measures the return that a single entity gets from an investment they make. If you want to make the ROI analogy work (which I don't think you should) one way to do it would perhaps be to compare the time invested with the amount of people the writer reaches. In that case the "ROI" of any method of writing could be super low (if nobody reads it) or super high (if everyone reads it).
Another way to look at it would be that the time to read something you cite is actually the amount of "investment" by a reader. In that case I expect that many readers experience zero return (or even negative return) on their investment of 30s to read an internet post, while they may experience incalculable, life-changing return from 8 hours spent reading a book. Or, probably less often, vice versa.