I wish more people knew how shady things are behind the scenes of exchanges. I think many people think you just fill in a form and then like magic you get listed. Even in this thread I know for a fact that some of the exchanges mentioned as good and even in that linked thread about Crypto Exchange comparison the information is wildly inaccurate. It's nothing like that anymore, huge listing fees and crazy terms and conditions in the contracts are the norm and while exchanges may say publicly "free listing" I can assure in many cases that is not the case as there is nearly always a catch. Some examples of these catches would include taking out an expensive "Marketing Package" and using their own expensive "Legal Services".

Other things that many people don't know are that many exchanges have "Volume Targets" which they set for you. They take a deposit of a large amount of BTC and set you a large daily volume target to hit, if you don't hit that volume for 2 consecutive days then they take that BTC deposit you gave them as compensation. This essentially promotes wash trading and fake volume on exchanges as projects have to fill the gap if volume drops below. Another thing is having to use their "Market Making" facilities which usually means supplying them with a large % of your supply and essentially allowing them to control the price or depositing upwards of $1M into their MM account.

As an example of what a listing can cost here is what it is for a well renowned mid tier exchange. Listing fee 35BTC, additional 35BTC "deposit" that they hold, mandatory marketing package the cheapest of which is $30k, daily volume target of $200k. If you go below the daily volume target goodbye 35BTC deposit.

I think since the ICO boom exchanges got extremely greedy as they were able to get away with charging these fees as many projects did have those stupid amounts of cash raised to pay these fees. That has left projects trying to do things properly at a huge disadvantage as essentially the entire market is rigged as pay to play now. The new thing is IEO in which again exchanges want a huge % of the supply and can control it's price again.

Charging these huge fees and other practices exchanges now employee as the norm are not to "protect investors" like they claim it's just greed pure and simple and they are basically encouraging projects to do shady things to raise the money to pay these outrageous fees. Projects are no longer listed based on the merit of their project but based on how deep their pockets are.

I mean look at the CMC exchange rankings right now, who are all these exchanges in the top 20? Haven't heard of barely any of them, who is using them? Check their order books and see how thin they are yet they are supposedly doing over $1B in volume. The top "adjusted" exchange right now is FatBTC and their top trading pair is ETH/USDT which is apparently doing $300M daily volume yet of you look at the orderbook selling 1 ETH would drop the price by 20%, it's ridiculous.