I've bought quite a bit of advertising over the past 12 months for various sites I own. I've had some good experiences and some bad experiences...I'm sure that's the case for anyone who's actively buying advertising on other sites. In that time I've come up with a checklist, so to speak, of things that will disqualify someone as a potential person I want to advertise with. 1) They mention PR. PR is so incredibly worthless I can't believe anyone still uses it as part of their sales pitch. It was worthless when it updated monthly. Now that it only updates every couple of months it's solidified it's worthless position. As we've all seen PR can be faked too. 2) They talk about how many "hits" the site gets. 3) They won't grant temporary access to web stats. 4) People who respond with completely unrelated offers. I post that I want to buy advertising on a site with a blue widget theme and get PM'd or e-mailed offers for stuff that is completely unrelated. 5) People that take 2 - 3 days to respond to requests without explanation. What about everyone else? What are the factors you use to decide who you're going to advertise with?
Wow, so refreshing to see someone looking to buy advertising that doesn't place a high regard for PR. If I had a dollar for everyone asking for advertising details on my sites that tried to negotiate lower pricing only because of my sites PR instead of actually asking how many visitors I got I could retire!
Instead of complaining, why don't you create a form that explains what you expect from a perspective client and educate people? I bet you waste less time and get better clients. Saying I hate the questions you ask does not improve the experience for either party.
I equate buying advertising based on PR to buying a car with a odometer that only updates the milage once every 2 - 4 months
I use yahoo backlinks (needs to be over several 100k), and number of pages indexed in Google to decide whether purchasing side-wide spots will boost my serps. I've mostly seen that these end up to be PR8 news sites. So, yes, HIGH PR is my main concern provided that in can be substantiated easily with huge numbers in yahoo! Traffic would be a good indicator of the quality of the site, so it too is important to me, although footer text links don't bring hardly any direct traffic. So, I wouldn't dish out several hundred bucks for text links on high traffic sites alone. (The link popularity has to be very high, varifiable by yahoo's linkdomain search). As far as theme goes, news sites are good for my educational theme since the ones I advertise on are run by universities like UC berkeley etc.