@brandonfrye,

This is why you have to kill all vote-gaming mechanisms (bidbots, multiple-account-self-upvoting) and channel "upvoting capital" into manual curation. If Hot and Trending really were "the best quality content," (like they're supposed to be), advertisers wouldn't care about Follower counts. They want "quality content" and "honestly engaged audiences" and placement in Hot or Trending would be evidence enough and many would pay a premium for it.

Each author interested in attracting advertising would fill out a Certification Checklist prior to posting: Subject Matter; Profanity; Graphic Images; Political Controversy; etc. Advertisers could then tailor their desired audiences accordingly.

BTW: Some advertisers WANT profanity and/or political controversy: Nike and the "Colin Kaepernick Ad" ... that was a deliberate attempt by Nike to "create a controversy" (and thereby generate a ton of FREE advertising via news coverage and social media warfare).

Besides advertising on legit Hot/Trending posts, some advertisers may decide to regularly advertise on all of certain authors' posts, perhaps seeking a long-term advertising relationship with guaranteed placement and a fixed cost. Others may seek to advertise solely within certain categories (tags).

The controversy at YouTube respecting demonetization was about YouTube demonetizing certain videos for "ALL advertisers" (because of the sensibilities of a few of the largest ones). Why didn't YouTube just insist that each video be accurately tagged according to its content, and then let each individual advertiser apply their own criteria?

"Speech Suppression" now comes into play ... many (myself included) believe that YouTube (Google) is deliberately trying to silence certain kinds of speech, by bankrupting the speakers, and using "advertiser objection" as the excuse for yielding the cudgel.

Quill