WhyIStoppedBuyingLinks

I want to be precise about this, because it is usually argued as ethics and that is not my argument. I stopped because the numbers stopped working.

For a long time a paid placement cost a couple of hundred, landed in a week, and either worked or did nothing. Downside was bounded at the fee. Against outreach — six weeks, a much lower hit rate, real labour cost — buying looked rational, and for a while it was.

The downside stopped being bounded at the fee. Once a site is identified as selling, the discount is applied retroactively to everything it has ever linked to, and the client now owns a clean-up project rather than a wasted invoice.

The fee was never the cost. The fee was the deposit.

Buying links teaches an organisation that links are procurement. Once that idea is established, the questions become about unit price and volume, and the far harder question — what does this company know that a publication would want — never gets asked at all.

That question is the one with compounding returns. A company that can answer it has a link source that does not depreciate, and it is the only asset in this discipline that a competitor cannot simply outspend.

Honesty requires the other column. It means slower ramp-up, fewer placements per quarter, and losing pitches to anyone quoting volume. I lose work over this regularly and expect to keep doing so.