I was joining bounty from year 2017 till present i have experience joining different signature and social media campaign with good earnings and there are also campaigns that is not profitable and sometimes there are campaign that doesn't pay, because the project does not reach the hard cap when they launch ICO, most of the projects pays token that is not listed on exchange and we need to wait a months or maybe a year before we can sell our tokens and get the profit and sometimes we also buy tokens from the good projects that we promote and hold, can we considered the patience of the bounty hunter same as the investors patience?
2017 was the peak of bounty hungting and most of the bounty there was paid and the reward was really big compared to thousand of bounties these days. Although still there was some scam projects and didn't make it from ICO to the exchanges but still you got decent rewards from there, compared to today it's really sad.
Bounty hunters can't be recognized as investors because you don't invest anything(money) into the projects. That's the core key of investment, if you pay something to buy some assets for hoping to get some bigger return then that's called investment.