Out of curiousity, what is it that makes bot sales promotion tools successful. Personally, I find bots annoying and the idea of purchasing from a service that uses bots is ridiculous to me. Apparently, they are quite successful though

I believe the only targets they will attract are people who have issues in the area they try to bring to attention. For example your website is having problems due to bandwidth consumption , and you see an add saying "Save Bandwidth, With HTML Optimization." Then your mind re-acts and things "hmmmmm....." you click it just because you think "Hey, maybe this may help, know harm in looking" and before you know it all the speel and testimonials that they proberly have made up themselves hook you in and you end up buying it. Hope this gives you an idea or insight.

There is something psychologically weird about the whole thing though. I mean, for me personally, I would have a hard time patronzing someone who was advertising in such an underhanded manner

true, it's really a very strange type of marketing.
I don't suppose they would bother doing it unless there is some type of profit being made from it.

But are we looking at the wave of the future?

who knows , it's all interesting though i believe there will be a lot more techniques to come on selling products via advertising whether they work or not is a completely different subject.

Personally, I can never imagine using a service that advertises via bots. Even when i've heard good things about the service, I don't feel they deserve my custom if they use bot advertising.

Yea, I highly doubt they get all that much business I bet it more just helps get their business out and advertises both for the search engines and for the back linking.

Even though more than half the time some spam bots are successful they can get quite annoying and very repetitive lol. I find it that what makes them evil to me is that they are annoying bots that are spamming up the web >:( lol

To be very honest I am really sick of this word. It is just my psychological/unconscious response...perhaps due to major sites, all forums, search engines, etc... hate bots.