Diving into Link Baiting Services

Rand’s post about his possible ‘link bait consulting’ service got me thinking:

Seeing all this in advance and taking into account the lessons of the
past, it may be wise to jump ahead 24-30 months and simply offer
linkbait services only to those who are ready and
financially/organizationally ready to make this leap. My initial
thoughts are that services would cost from $75-$150K and we’d only take
3-4 projects like this per year.

Is anyone else offering link baiting as a service? It seems like the type of thing that would be hard to ‘price’, as good link bait can be a 2000 word article, or a sexy AJAX app, and anything in between… there’s no one-size-fits all. I searched for "buzz marketing" and "viral marketing" (loose synonyms) in Google to see what comes up (if they can rank, they must be decent, right?).

Buzzmarketing.com services – "Whether it involves PR, events, stunts, remnant TV, or the Internet…we take responsibility", but couldn’t get pricing info
Buzz Marketing Group – appears to specialize in market research, no pricing info
Buzzoodle – appear to specialize in strategy and tracking, again, no pricing info
DMC – appears to do the ‘implentation’, you guessed it, no pricing info available (hey guys, why don’t you all read Jakob Nielsen once in a while)
Viral & Buzz Marketing Association – pretty extensive list of firms who do this

I suspect buying buzz marketing services is a lot like buying PR services — there are a few good firms, a lot of pretty terrible ones, and you never know what kind of ROI you’re going to get.

I got to give props to Rand to showing his pricing. Yeah, it ain’t "cheap"  if you have a "what can I get for a hundred bucks" mentality, but, from a value-based perspective, if you can get 500k of links out of 100k worth of link baiting, well…

So does anyone have tips for buzz marketing / link baiting services? Who is doing this? And what do they typically pay?