They also have an okay s:n ratio in my experience, as the mod team can work the experience. Like for example, q&a type threads tend to be useful. There are folks promoting things but it’s obvious when they are.

Because the tiny niche audience isn't a cost effective marketing group? Advertisers want to maximize their reach and well, it's not like they know these groups even exist.

I'm sure it happens a lot regardless, but the vast majority of content in those is still just from regular people. You can tell by the information posted as it tends to be more or less truthful and useful. Once it stops being that it'll be obvious enough. Like when Russian bots invade your average Ukraine related r/worldnews post.

>Because the tiny niche audience isn't a cost effective marketing group? A

That's the magic of Reddit, 4Chan and every other cesspool where any niche is only a slight URL change away from any other niche.

It's trivially easy to add niche subs 2, 3 and 4 to the list of places that you target.

Yeah and then any mod with half a brain sees you're spamming things everywhere and bans you.

1) That's a whack-a-mole exercise when the astrorufer buys accounts in bulk.

2) You can tune these systems to be indistinguishable from a flesh and blood product fanboy at first glance. Not all spammers drop the same comments mentioning their product everywhere. You can dilute it with meaningless AI generated banter so the mod has to scroll through a couple pages and connect the dots before deciding whether you're a bot or just an idiot who happens to like some product.

Except that there is a culture of looking for and outing shills in a lot of subs, and since you can see someone's entire post history it's usually not hard to confirm or at least provide solid evidence for it once you suspect it. I had someone out an astroturfer who posted a banal non-response to one of my comments just the other day.

You don't need to be the size of Coca Cola to successfully astroturf, there are enough companies specialized in social media marketing.

Take r/mechanicalkeyboards for example, arguably a niche community. The enthusiasts there are very motivated to buy new things and are willing to pay quite a lot of money for them. Place a few of your bots there to promote your artisan keycaps and watch people pay top bucks for them.