Coming from an experienced bounty campaign manager, I think there is no reason not to believe you, so yes I agree with you as definitely that's the reality here, both gambles, the team and the bounty hunters as they both exert an effort to try to make a project successful.
maybe we can say that the success rate now is very small, probably 1%? or even lower?
Well put yourself in shoes of an investor. Someone who has money and is willing to spend it.
Would you:
a) Check some credible sources to see which projects are promising. Like real article teardowns into teams and roadmap
or
b) Check on twitter, find a random hunter with fake profile who's promoting 50 projects at once, and believe him
Which one of those would you choose as an investor?
Now, tell me, which one of those would you pay with USD as a project owner?
I think that is still depending on the situation and the project you are marketing, there are still projects who would prefer to advertise in the forum compared to popular platforms like google.
One best example is Chipmixer although not an ICO project but since you've mentioned about advertising so I brought it here.
and here's the statement.
Some companies (Google) will advertise known scams. Some people (theymos) will not advertise possible scam (ICOs) even if it costs them (around 9 BTC per week). This is a reason why ChipMixer buy ads at this forum and not on Google.
And I like to add as well that there are some ICO projects in the past that are paying huge Bitcoin just for promotion.
Like this one.
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=1747399.0