“Bounties increase exposure and visibility” Do they?

Question

“Bounties increase exposure and visibility”

Yeah, and I'm the queen of Sheba.

I recently asked this question, and was thrilled to receive answers from a Frisian and a Dutch speaker. I was so thrilled because the two answers were original and included references too, so I felt compelled to award @Janne B a 50 rep bounty.

If I could offer a second 50 rep bounty to @Henno Brandsma I would do, but it's against the bounty regulations and more of that later.

The question was still in/on the HNQ list, it had earned 19 upvotes, the first two answers posted had already garnered consensus but I felt it was a pity that two answers from two new contributors seemed to be largely ignored. I wanted greater attention for their answers. They deserved it.

I placed the bounty with anticipation.

MASSIVE SLUMP IN VIEWS

The number of views slowed to a limping snail's pace. However, @JEL did post a rather fantastic answer so not all was in vain but still... neither did his answer earn the recognition it deserved.

Each and every time I fall for this idea that bounties help increase a question's visibility and exposure. And no, I'm not forgetting its main scope

A bounty is a special reputation award given to answers. This feature was designed to motivate answerers, and help questions get the answers they deserve

Getting that elusive answer is an important and fundamental requisite and a perfectly natural desire. But you're more likely to receive a higher number of answers and original answers too if the question enters the HNQ. (You hit the jackpot if your question is answered by tchrist, Sven Yargs, JEL, Araucaria or Janus Bahs Jacquet.)

Bounties on EL&U do not guarantee exposure or visibility, not anymore. They're like the kiss of death.

To sum up, bounties on EL&U are not as effective as they once were. Leaving aside off-topic and VLQ questions, if an on-topic question does not get those invaluable three or four upvotes and an answer in the first 2 hours (?), the post will likely disappear from the main page. One solution is "bumping" because a post is more likely to get some kind of response if it stays on the first page. This tactic isn't necessary if the post hits HNQ because the traffic it attracts is very powerful.

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Now, I'm left with a dilemma, award a 100 rep bounty to @Henno Brandsma and then 200 rep bounty to JEL's answer. I wish I could award three bounties of 50 rep each. What to do....what to do....?

Please discuss. And please provide data to either confirm or refute my assumptions.

UPDATE 17/11/2018
JEL is awarding a 100 bounty rep to Henno Brandsma's fine answer

Answer 1

Ludomania!

As I said in my comments, we all know the answer to this question (and we know the fundamental flaw in the question, too).

FOR SCIENCE!

But ꜰᴏʀ sᴄɪᴇɴᴄᴇ! here is some data anyway. I ran the query in the MSE post I pointed you to on the current EL&U SEDE database.

Here are the material results:

Bounty?  N        avg_score  avg_max_score  accept_rate  avg_views 
-------  ------   ---------  -------------  -----------  --------- 
No       109,471  2          4.61           0.458        7,253
Yes      941      4.2        15.36          0.672        15,041     

So bountied questions get, on average, twice the number of views as non-bountied questions, and their scores (+1s) also increase commensurately. Which means you're reaching people who have +1 privs who do not usually vote (low-rep users and users from other stacks, like with the HNQ).

Well, what about answers then? Same deal. Here's stats for the same questions before and after bountying them:

rel_date  N      avg_score  bountied_rate  accepted_rate 
--------  ----   ---------  -------------  ------------- 
before    2,573  8.5        0.114          0.111         
after     3,835  2.2        0.178          0.099         

More than a thousand answers were posted as direct responses to bounties.

Gambling twice doesn't double my stack?!

Now, turning to the idea that you considered posting several bounties on this question, I'll just quote the conclusions Jon Ericson♦ drew in his more expert analysis of a much larger dataset:

Bounties certainly increase attention (as designed). There is some indication that a single bounty also increases answer quality, but multiple bounties probably don't increase anything but attention. I'm only looking at Stack Overflow, but spot checks other sites show similar results.

Caveat gamblor¹!

So, the data bears out everything we thought it would. To which you responded:

that was posted fours years ago and it's not valid for EL&U. ... I'm saying ~Bounties on EL&U do not guarantee exposure or visibility, not anymore~ Emphasis on not anymore

No, no, emphasis on do not guarantee. There are no guarantees in life, not here on EL&U nor anywhere else.

Your question boils down to exactly the same complaint users always post about bounties when they didn't get the results they wanted.

In fact, it's the same complaint people have made to their marketing folks since advertising was invented.

You're not paying for results. No one can guarantee you results. You pays your money points, and you takes your chances.

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¹ _{I thought lusor would be funnier, but ran a real risk of being taken the wrong way.}