There are different possibilities.
Some exchanges try to catch traders with 0% trading fees in the first x months to get liquidity. I personally prefer this, but of course it can fail if your exchange is not attractive (in sense of usability and API).
Instead of 0%, you can also make 0.1% taker and -0.1% maker -> so maker will get money for providing liquidity.
"Hitbtc" has "maker contracts". I doubt anyone is market making at hitbtc, since the contract details are very hard, but the idea is still good:
https://hitbtc.com/mmedit:
when reading your last sentence, it sounds very much like the exchange "quoine"... they also build their own "fake liquidity" with very stupid bots. I made ton of money by arbitrage with their stupid bots, but of course all trades were reverted, since they made a loss, since it was just their fake volume.
I hate this kind of liquidity and will not advise anyone to trade at such an exchange with fake liquidity.
Thanks. I'll check hitbtc.
I have few ideas how to keep new traders and makers on the exchange by giving them smaller fee or reward. However I need to provide initial liquidity and I'll do it via API bot. But simple copy/pasting of orderbook will entail losses on fees while I'll be trying to keep a storage in balance (I need to buy back BTC after I sold em on my exchange). So I guess I need to increase spread that I'll be able to make clearing through the parent exchange. Maybe someone already has an experience with such solution.