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For one example, I discovered Joule (new immersion circulator from ChefSteps) when they appeared on Cooking Issues. While they've since taken advertising from ChefSteps, I'm pretty sure the initial appearance was Dave Arnold chatting with Chris Young(? I think it was him) because he (Dave) thought it was an interesting product.

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That example doesn't work, though. Follow the chain back to its source: how did ChefSteps get its first customers for its first product? And that question ends up being critical because it's kind of silly to use as an example a product that is from a company with existing direct-marketing channels with existing customers and existing relationships with what are functionally marketing venues (and while I like Dave Arnold and Cooking Issues a lot, it's in many ways a marketing venue--mostly for Arnold's own stuff, but for the occasional interesting-to-him product too, ChefSteps's guy wasn't going on there just to chat).

Advertising can and regularly is done well; Giant Bomb, a CBSi joint, never takes ads for games or game-related accessories on their podcasts and the hosts don't endorse the product when they do the ad. I don't think an astroturfed universe (which is the inevitable end result of "oh, no advertising"--see the profusion of "native advertising" for similar) is a better universe.

That's a false dichotomy. The options aren't advertising or astroturfing (which is just advertising). My goal is to not look at ads, be they pop-ups or sponsored Reddit posts.

It's true that companies won't be able to saturate markets quickly without ads, but I'm not sure why we want that. I'd rather see small businesses grow slowly based on the quality of their products than see companies with the best advertising grow, crushing competitors with better products. Every dollar spent on advertising is a dollar not spent on developing a good product.

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