Ads have pros and cons, as I'm sure you know better than do I.

Some negatives not commonly understood, however, are the potential for ads to be means to launder money, or to capture a platform and essentially hold it hostage. Advertisers wielding nominal stake with care can make a platform dependent on their funds.

While this seems unlikely on Steem, various malignancies can result even if the dependency is apparently less than total, or even seems minimal.

There are platforms today that only persist in operations due to their essential captivity to specific advertisers/communities. If certain emoluments feature in executive pay mechanisms, platforms that are losing money are still able to be abused, and such abuse concealed from investors.

There are very sophisticated players in the advertising market. Not a few of them are much different than what they seem.

I was happy to get out of that line of work. Do undertake specific care regarding covert attack vectors that advertisers may seek to employ to increase the influence they wield across Steem. It may be trivial, or only appear trivial, at the outset.

The game can be pretty savage, and the successful players are brutal. It is inadvisable for me to go into specific detail here regarding various hazards I became aware of prior to leaving that field, but some of them were existential.

Fair warning.