This isn't exclusive to books, either. If you so much as give platforms a hint of you being an aspiring musician, basically all of your ads on that platform will be Spotify promotion scams that work about the same way.

It's hard not to escape the feeling that there's just plain 'ol too much stuff being made and not enough hours in the day for humanity to actually enjoy it (much less, enjoy it enough to be willing to pay for it). However, I also remember a time not too long ago when even complete garbage would get at least some engagement on socials. It definitely feels like social media platforms are doing a lot more active gatekeeping than they used to. Posts that don't echo the platform owner's preferred sentiments just smack against a brick wall now.

It doesn't help that these platforms actively engage in roughly the same scams the scammers are doing. Spotify has Discovery Mode, Amazon has ad blocks everywhere, every social media company has paid promotion. All of those are vehicles to force creative artists to lower their take and "make it back up in volume".

If I were to sum up the old bargain of the Internet, it was: "give us content for free and we will find people who want it". Going all the way back to the Napster wars, people argued that this is unsustainable, people die of exposure, and you can't compete with free. It turns out, however, that exposure is still useful to a lot of artists - assuming the exposure is genuine[0]. Actually, it's so valuable the platforms would rather not barter it away for content anymore! The new bargain is "pay us to publish and we will find people proportional to how much you pay us".

This even applies to traditional publishing models now. I am told there are a lot of publishers who expect their artists to bring their own exposure. Marketing[1] muscle (and capital) is not wasted on the midlist anymore. So book publishing is about as much of a scam as a record label now.

[0] The dirty secret of all the beggars who want to "pay you in exposure" is that they don't actually have any exposure to give.

[1] Related to the proliferation of promotion scams at the low end, the high end of marketing is chock full of companies willing to give away mountains of cash without being particularly choosy about where it goes. Think how many companies are paying Google for ad spots on their own name, for example.