And they really would not have much reason to exist except for greed.
If they stay profitable, even if promoted content is incorporated into trending, people will still choose bid bots because that way they can recover the money they spend into promoting their content.
Right, extrapolating current state, they'd be losing money to do that. I feel like in order to get that high amount, they necessarily are losing quite a bit.
So we'll have see the cost comparing promoted vs bid bot trending I guess. And the slotted mechanism could work in other ways too (targeting tags, etc)