Here is the story http://searchfeature.com/blog/new-york-times-and-time-magazine-are-buying-paid-links/ Digg and Sphinn it: http://digg.com/programming/New_York_Times_and_Time_Magazine_are_buying_paid_links http://sphinn.com/story/52874
The sites selling the links can get their sites bitch slapped by Google. But the writer's point is that everyone is doing it.
hahaha yes these are people buying link but only those who don't care for result because they have already to much traffic directly and organic way . They don't have small webmaster pages this is New York Times and Time magazine which is well known .
I don't know why everyone gets so shady around link buying...sure, it's frowned upon. But if you want to survive in this business, then I'm quite sure that at one point or another 9/10 people have purchased a link (and that might be in the form of a blog post, a review on a blog, etc....). It's necessary most of the time, especially in e-commerce. If it only takes a few links to get ahead of a competitor, damn right I'm going to do whatever I have to do! (Just do it smartly, right?!)