Just would like to make a comment here. Personally, I gave up on looking for links which would bring me direct traffic. Since most site owners would rather have that traffic click adsense links and be paid per click than give advertisers a prominant position on there pages which would result in siginificant direct click through trafic to the advertiser's site. Would be interesting to see, if generally people are sucessful when attempting to purchase text links for traffic purposes.
Not sucessful at all, most text links are below the fold, rarely seen and never clicked on - they tend to be sold for serp purposes - which is a shame. I would be very interested in having high placed static links on relevant sites, they would be far more beneficial.
That's what I was attemting to bring forth also. The site owner would normally loose adsense revenue by placing text links above the fold. In the last year or so, it's pretty much become unrealistic to even expect text links for traffic pruposes. This is why I believe PR (verifiable through yahoo's linkdomain search) will continue to remain a major factor when assessing the value of a text links package.
I have quite a few text ads that are on the top of pages of sites. They bring traffic and some traffic as well. To say that they are mostly in the footers or in bad spots of sites isn't too accurate.