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Comment by mpclark | Hacker News Reader

IME a lot of these people are middle men -- though it looks like it, they aren't actually offering to buy a link; they'll just add you to the list of sites willing to sell links that they hawk around to other site operators (via spam, natch)

Also, when I see prices mentioned, they tend to be in the $10-$50 range. But that could just be the tier my sites are in, I guess.

All that aside, it's an absolute no from me. Lie down with dogs, get fleas.

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I've actually jerked a lot of them around, I don't do it much anymore as I had my fun, but you're right. A lot of them will start with extremely lowball offers. I've had one guy email me once and I played with him for a while, he went from $25 per link to around $300 over the course of 5-6 emails.

For him, the middleman, it makes no sense to start with the real offer because in his mind he is thinking, "If I go as low as possible below the baseline, I get to keep the rest.".

Yeah, it's a no from me also. I mean it would not make any sense for me to write an article like that on my site even though it is about tech. It would be like lighting a fire in my living room and asking, "What's wrong?".

So basically they have to do this manually like that because they are shut out from traditional ad networks?

No, they pay for placing do-follow links to their (or their customers) site, something you can't do with ad networks per se.

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