Would be interested in the experiences of people who sponsor wordpress themes ie buy the footer/designer links. Have you found that you get a real benefit? Are you sure that the theme get's submitted to sites? How many backlinks do you normally get from one theme if you checked your site with a backlink checker say one month after? Do you have evidence that the theme actually gets downloaded and used by other people? If so how many? Please ONLY contribute to this thread if you have actual experience of the benefits. Theme sellers please DO NOT contribute - you can start another thread elsewhere if you want to extol the virtues of your products!
I have sponsored some themes in the past and found some people here on DP. To be honest some of the themes have never been used whereas some themes were downloaded more than 20 times. I'm planning to sponsor a few more themes soon and will only deal with people who provided good themes.