There is heavy advertising here for Stake. Many signatures are Stake's. This isn't to say that Stake is a bad book, it just says that advertising is heavy here.
I wouldn't pay that much attention to advertisement and signature campaigns when determining the quality of a casino or a sportsbook. Besides, I don't like the way Stake and their people run the signature campaign on Bitcointalk. Anyone who spends a lot of time on this forum and knows its most quality members will realize that none of them are in Stake's campaign. A more professional campaign manager would have enabled better weekly pay rates and attention to quality and not quantity of posts like it is now.
I guess now we know why Stake and others pay for quantity, it works and gives the impression desired.
I'm not sure how anyone who pays attention to the actual gambling activity on the forum could miss out on how bad some Stake posters are at posting quality, constructive content that actually contributes to gambling.
I run several self-moderated threads. I'm active in many gambling threads. I also run
my own thread publishing best odds on value longshots -- this is 5 seasons running, and the best lines are shown, lately, it's only been Sportsbet where I place bets. Granted, it's a niche market (long odds with price boost) but I have featured many books over the years and slowly, taken them off owing to closure (like Bitcoinrush), bad support, or bad lines (nitro was an early casualty years ago due to this).
On self-mod threads, I delete a lot of spam and they come from Stake a lot. I get the impression most of them aren't even gamblers and wouldn't know the first thing about advising on a book/casino. I use Stake don't get me wrong (MMA best odds and decent house games), but I bet on sports almost daily and I get the best odds elsewhere (generally at Sportsbet because of price boost which blows everyone out of the water) on my niche market.
But let's ignore content quality and inspect gambling content. Look around the forum and you'll find casino and sports gamblers who actually gamble (provably, either through screenshots or betslip sharing) generally come from a handful of sites. Look at Gambling discussion (not ANNs), scan through betslips and screenshots. Cross reference with quality content. Look at where their money is.
My impression is, actual gamblers put their wallet where their mouth is -- you know which sites they rate, by correlation of where most of their bets are placed. Don't look at signatures and empty posts promoting their sites.
And for the majority of users who post, you'll find they actually don't gamble. Just there to spam.
Ratings are... arbitrary. And I say this with reference to my own thread that in effect rates books by the value they offer me in my specific type of gambling. I could rate phones and any idiot could do the same but in the end, if the world majority buys an iPhone despite its many flaws (according to me), that's the "best" phone there is out there because that's where people vote with their money. My thoughts, anyway.
buwaytress - thanks for jumping in this thread. It's obvious that you've been around the block. I read your thread and like it. I'll just talk about the books that you have posted above. I really liked Bitcoinrush when they were up. One of the few that ran NFL contests. The owner seemed to be a great guy but you are right in some slow responses since it seemed to be a 1 or 2 man show.
With Nitrobetting, you will find the best lines many times. As you well know, the line is more important than the margin. Even if we are talking margins, look at American football at Nitrobetting. The margin is small.
With Betcoin, they now have 2 sets of lines along with boosted odds. Because of this, you'll find the best lines many times. As an example, in college football they had Utah Utes -4 while everyone else was -5. I haven't looked at lines for this weekend yet. For live lines Betcoin may have more markets than anyone else.
With Sportsbet, I'll still have to stick by never getting the best line. My previous search was in depth. I just took a quick look and didn't see any changes. Since I didn't check all markets, I could be wrong.