I don't know if this happens due to the economic crisis but i've seen that lately link selling business is going really really bad. People pay too few for quality related links and this happens because: 1) they don't think seo is too important 2) they are afraid to invest money in online and get quality links for their websites 3) there are a lot of users that accept cheap rates for links just to make a quick buck The rates went down really fast and i've seen a lot of nasty sites with tons of links that are simply awful for seo. What advantage could you get from a link bought on a website that has more than 30 outgoing links? Link buyers don't know which links are important, don't know how important is a ranking in top 100k on alexa which could bring them a lot of traffic and would be awesome if it's related. A lot of buyers only want PR which is a really stupid sh*t. it's just a bar filled with more or less green but it won't influence at all your seo rankings if it's bigger. They don't know the difference between page rank and trust rank and they offer lowsy prices for links. Link sellers tend to accept too few for links just to make some $$$ but they will see how good it is when they get a penalty from Google for link selling and their indexed pages dissapear and traffic goes down fast. Their sites will suffer and the one that bought the link won't have any advantage from that website. Anyway, what i'm trying to say is that ... it's better to sell links in private via a contact form on your website rather than sell them really cheap here on DP. I've got some offending offers via PM here on DP that made me realize that people don't know the real value of quality links. i got a pr2 site, with 2.5k uniques/day - automotive.com pays like $100/month for 2 links there and a "smart" user comes and says "i can't pay more than 20/year for a sitewide link". that's why link selling business is going down, because a lot of users don't appreciate quality links.
I think that you need to add, on top of it all, that selling links feels like selling illegal stuff in a black market. Now that Google is against it and looking to penalize your site if you get caught, selling links directly in your website is not a good idea anymore. Thats why we end up in the forums, selling website descriptions (avoiding links in your post for the same reason), hopefully you will get a better price among webmasters than with the general public.