A WebmasterWorld thread is suggesting that after his site was hit by the PageRank penalty from several months ago, he has been getting more qualified advertisers. Here is what this publisher is saying:

This site has been hit with the same PageRank penalty. Have I seen a decrease in the number of people requesting I exchange links with them? Far from it. But I think there may have been a drop in the number of requests to just buy PageRank. So, on that level, I do agree – it saves me a lot of time in terms of weeding out the bad advertisers from the good.

So less advertisers are requesting to “buy PageRank” and more advertisers are interested in actually promoting their product/service and/or supporting this site. Which is exactly what I want. I also assume this is exactly what Google wanted, so can this turn into a win-win situation for Google and publishers? I certainly hope so.

For more history on the PageRank penalties, see here, but also note this also, before seeing the first link.

Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld.