... In the past, options were available between ICOs, crypto exchanges, mixers, tokens,...etc, but since 2020, most of the promotion has moved to social media. Then the options became between mixers and gambling, and mixers were banned.
If gambling campaigns find another place to promote, they will inevitably stop promoting here, regardless of the quality of the posts. This is what happened with mixers, which was moved to another forum, although the results was not guaranteed...
I don't think I could have summed it up any better.
There is also link building and brand building. Link building is one of the few cases where even spam may work for advertisers, but its importance has declined in recent years as search engines have found ways to deal with the link spam problem, which of course is not limited to Bitcointalk but the whole web. Brand building is in contrast benefitted by high quality content.
You who registered in 2013 surely lived through the first few years of quality posts but the merit system was introduced in January 2018 to deal with the spam problem that did not come overnight. As of today we are better in terms of overall quality posts than in 2017 and basically today practically only casinos are advertised.
The Mixers were the perfect only Bitcoin service and the only place they would get clients, at least on the clearnet, without being demonized was this forum. I don't think them making paid posts on Social media would help/work for them.
Good point.