You're missing the point entirely, and honestly, it's the same mistake too many SEO agencies make when evaluating any kind of third-party listing.
The clicks are almost irrelevant. What you're actually paying for is a backlink from a domain with serious authority - 2,500 referring domains in this case. That passes real link juice back to your own site. There's a beautiful irony in an SEO agency paying for SEO juice, but it works. It's a shortcut to better rankings for your own domain, which then drives your own pipeline. That's the product.
The other half is the trust signal. Qualified buyers rarely discover an agency through a directory. They find you through a referral, a LinkedIn post, or a conference. Then they Google your name, and a listing on a known review site pops up. It validates you instantly. It's the same reason businesses still pay for a Better Business Bureau listing nobody browses. It's not a discovery channel, it's a credibility prop for people already checking you out.
So yeah, 1,500 clicks a month looks like a terrible deal if you're measuring clicks. But measuring clicks on a directory is like measuring the value of a testimonial by how many times someone reads it. You're buying perception and authority, not traffic. Whether the price is worth it is a fair debate, but "low clicks = bad value" is a surface-level take that misses what's actually being bought.
