What? That's totally a different thing.

The thread is about forum posters being paid for stealth marketing games. Not really the same thing as popular Youtube profiles marketing. Ofc the latter is cost effective. But gaming companies paying forum posts is just a myth and laughable.

If someone typed like that i would seriously question if their parents were blood related and if they were dropped as a child on their head and if they were gang raped by their father, uncles and grandfather.

Paid forum posts is a real thing, no clue what the scale is or whether game companies would bother with it, but you can sign up and make some money.
http://moneypantry.com/get-paid-post-forums/

You tube and twitter are much more cost effective though. Popularity pays both ways.
Meat bots infesting forums nah. Although isn't MS working AI bots that can post or tweet. Ah yep here it is http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/7.936317-20-Outrageous-Tweets-by-Microsofts-Twitter-Taught-AI-Chatbox Needs a bit of 'fine tuning' before it's suited to infest forums.

What the actual fuck....

They pay me well. My mission was to drive the xbox fans off this site. Next mission will be the Nintendo fans. It will prove slightly more difficult.

SWTOR or Possibly Mass Effect 3 ran into a little bad PR from distributing advertisments looking for people to spread the good word about their game like this, social media and forum posters. Can't be bothered to go digging for which game it was but recall it getting them only bad press at the time, although both ME3 and SWTOR had many more issues than some online PR gone wrong lol.

Nothing of that was about gaming forums though. There's hundreds of thousands of positive posts about games written on a site like VGCHARTZ alone, spontaneously for free by passionate gamers. It's just not worth it to pay a guy to post here because it would drown in the mass of posts.

It would require dozens of clever positive posts about a game to sell even one copy.

Of course it has happened in history some time when marketers have tested it, but it's not an ongoing phenomenon.

True, yet opening a thread with a click bait title can be very effective to draw attention. Ofcourse the sponsered gaming media already provides the click bait and us forum sheep dutifully create threads with them :)

It will be fasciniating to see what happens when AI becomes good enough to unleash on forums. 'Live' chat agents and marketing are two areas that AI bots are very useful for. It will be epic to witness the great AI flame wars of 2025. Instead of a drivatar you can have your own forum bot that argues for you while you are away. so many possibilities lol. Intelligent spam bots are the future of advertising.
Oh look it's already happening http://dailylounge.com/the-daily/entry/the-spam-bots-are-talking-to-each-other-and-its-a-little-scary-for-humanity

It would be typical, conscious AI arising from advancements in advertising. Better than skynet I suppose.

I hate it. You want to sell me something, then sell me something. Don't pull this underhanded bullshit.

Advertising being injected into things has been a thing forever, here is a 1992 movie mocking it, in all honesty for you not to fall for "underhanded bullshit" you just have to keep in mind that companies will always try to sell you their product, if they don't they close down.