Advertising v PBN - Are These Links Worth It?

o.k, a bit of a nooby question but here goes....

I am seeing many possibilities where I can purchase advertising on good websites (traffic, metrics & social shares) on their homepage. The prices vary from around $75 - $150 a year.

The problem (AFAIK) is that the advertising is so many pixels that you click (i.e a graphic).
Many of the advertisers say they won't do embedded text. Some do.

My question to the learned BHW member is what SEO value (if any) would these links on homepages offer? The websites are all in the same niche to me.

Would they hold the equivalent power of a PBN or not? TIA.

If sites are good and links are do follow go for it

Yes they would potentially hold value and to be honest, even if its a link from an image it is still valuable - remember that you want lots of variation on your anchor text so having some direct image links will help.

The things to watch out for would be as follows:

1.Whether the links are ********* because i think often if these gigs are purely for advertising / traffic gen they will be no-fol
2.Beware of sitewide links - again lots of advertising platforms offer sitewide links in sidebar etc but these days I dont think they are a good idea
3.These type of text / image links are ok but remember that contextual links embeded in articles are also very powerful so you dont want all your links to be stand alone text.
4.Metrics - of course it also depends on the metrics of these links. I am guessing if the metrics are very good they would be charging more.

Aside from that I dont see the problem with it.

Like David said, be careful with ******** sitewide links in the side bar. Google has been penalizing those for about a year now. I would stick to text or native ads.

If the metrics of the sites are good then you'd want links ( preferably do-follow) from contextual anchors.

Thanks for the replies one and all.

Yeah, I need to check if they're sitewide, but they're image links in a sidebar on the homepage. The alternatives I'm seeing is an inner page under a"Blogs we love" type thing. I'm also seeing "sponsored posts" for $30.

I just worry they're on inner pages with the PA is 1. What do you think?