"W3C makes no assurances that sites linked from the Supporters program will see improved ranking in search engine results. W3C instructs search engines to ignore links from the Supporters page."
If the paid links don't pass PageRank, I don't think Google has a problem with them. I've seen Matt Cutts say that quite a bit lately, because Forbes was caught doing this (again).
Google needs to just accept links are irreversibly compromised. They're not a measure of usefulness anymore.
There are companies that specialize in submitting crap to digg, reddit, even here on HN - those are all paid links.
Infographics are a marketing tool sites use to generate links - you pay your money, someone designs it and submits it to social news sites to generate links back to your completely unrelated website. Those are paid links too, and not necessarily the aforementioned ones.
The mainstream blog networks are virtually content farms these days churning out summaries designed to do nothing more than reinforce their search positions for companies and products etc.
There's a big market for selling and swapping links, any forum for webmasters of any kind is going to have that at play.
Then there's flat out spam - last year I watched a site get all the way up to the top 10 for "free online games" with nothing more than blog spamming software.
There's all the sponsorships, endorsements, paid promotions, reviews with incentives, referral/affiliate stuff, etc etc.
So many ways money can change hands to cause a link to appear on a site.
Meanwhile there's a massive amount of the internet that is not going to get any legitimate link love, ever.
Original comment was that the links were nofollowed. On the Current Members page they have the nofollow attribute right on the links.
In response, Kyle linked me to the Major Supporters page, on which the links themselves do not have the nofollow attribute, so I deleted my comment. However, it seems both Kyle and I forgot to check meta tags, and the links in question are indeed nofollowed.
just because a link is nofollow does not mean it will not help your rankings guys. It does not mean "ignore this link please Google" it means "I don't vouch for this link Google". A nofollow link will still count towards your total link profile.