Especially the smaller market cap coins. But even big coins like XRP, ADA etc I can almost gurantee you that they are paying for shills.
Don't beleive everything you see in Youtube and in Reddit. ADA to $10 eoy
Theta to $1000 and all of this shit.
Youtubers get 30K for 1 video to talk about the coin
I think that the big and established projects don't really have to pay for shills anymore because those are multi million dollar comapnies and everyone knows those projects already and i don't think some youtube oder twitter shiller with 50k subscribers will have any impact on that. Those shillers do that because they own bag of those projects themself and therefore they want the price to rise.
It's different on new and upcoming projects though. Crypto influencers often get a private sale allocation for this projects if they advertise for this projects, then once the project goes live and is tradeable those influencers will dump their big bags on to their followers.