Why should well-branded high PR link sellers worry about losing some PR?

[youfoundjake]

Ok, bear with me as this may seem to be a silly question.
Google's latest move on penalizing sites that sell advertising by taking away a point in PageRank seems to have created quite an upheavel in the industry. If the site is a high traffic site, more then likely by brand name, such as our very own WebmasterWorld, why is there a concern over loosing a point if WebmasterWorld decided to sell ads without a nofollow?
It would seem to me that a link from WebmasterWorld regardless of its PR would benefit me based on just the sure volumn of page views here. And knowing that, why not sale links?

If I have a high PR site, that gets alot of brand name recognition traffic, such as WebmasterWorld, why should I care if Google penalizes me for selling ads without a nofollow? I would still be getting the same amount of traffic, the advertiser would still be getting the same amount of referrals. Is the adspace price really being valued at the PageRank of the site, or is it based on the value of the popularity of the site based on unique visitors per day, returning visitors, and pageviews?

[jomaxx]

why should I care if Google penalizes me for selling ads without a nofollow? I would still be getting the same amount of traffic...

While this seems to be the case so far, it's not obvious that a drop in PR won't lead to a loss of traffic in the future.

And since PR (plus analysis of linking patterns in general) is the "secret sauce" that helped Google leapfrog all the other search engines, I wouldn't be surprised if they do go ahead and penalize sites in the actual SERPs. After all, the whole point of paid links is to game Google's search engine. Until recently links were vastly overpriced if you judge solely on the value of the resulting traffic and/or branding effect.

[ecmedia]

It seems that there are two types of link-seekers. Ones that seek a higher PR or improvement in search (SEO) and second that seek only traffic.

In my opinion if you are promising high traffic then it is best to sell links with nofollow. Everyone is good and Google has nothing against selling ads that do not manipulate its search engine.

[jtbell]

If I have a high PR site, that gets alot of brand name recognition traffic, such as WebmasterWorld, why should I care if Google penalizes me for selling ads without a nofollow?

If people are buying links from your site in order to gain PR, won't they be less likely to buy those links if they don't gain as much PR?

[youfoundjake]

If I ever buy or sell links, it would be based on the strength of the brand name, not based on the PageRank of the site. And I think that may be where Google may be messing around with stuff that doesn't really matter. Now on the flip side as mentioned by Jomaxx, if the presence in the SERPS is affected, then yeah, there may be a problem.
At what point would Google go from stripping PageRank to burying a site from the Serps?