Has anyone ever purchased traffic from a pay-to-surf company? Here is an example: http://cgi.ebay.com/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&category=16709&item=5592050878&rd=1 I am curious if this will hurt my sites in the long run and what experiences others may have had with pay-to-surf advertisers.
Stay awy from that kind of thing. It's mostly spiders coming in through various proxies or zombified machines. Others are forced pop-unders or pop-ups from seriously low quality sites whose users will only end up being angry that your site popped up out of nowhere. If you want to pay for traffic, try adwords or overture. Yeah, you won't get 10,000 visitors in 2 days for 50 bucks, but if you work it right the visitors you do get will be quality.
A really bad idea. The traffic is not even interested. Also avoid cheap redirect and popunder traffic, although I have heard that some is OK.