There's a borough in my city that decided to ban big billboards. Everyone hated them, they were ugly and everywhere. The advertising lobby sued, it went all the way to the supreme court of Canada, and the city won: advertising was declared a form of visual pollution and therefore banning them was an acceptable infringement to free speech (https://www.scc-csc.ca/case-dossier/info/sum-som-eng.aspx?ca...).
Another example is forcing influencers to disclose when content is sponsored (and apply local advertising laws). If influencers receive money, they are therefore freelancers (in most jurisdictions) and subject to many laws. I have seen them enforced in my jurisdiction.
Then the local guy can print "SHERIFF JOE SUCKS" on his fence without repercussions but large billboards are mostly banned.
You still have the gas station sign issue, but that's separate.
But other are pretty thinly veiled, and some commenters are pretty obviously pushing something. It gets cleaned up decently well.
I've found immense value in studying media criticism to improve my literacy of what is "genuine" journalism (of course still colored by someone's ideology, just maybe not one so hamfistedly handed down from above) and advertising dressed up as "news" or conveniently shaped and styled narratives that mislead the public into believing something that will only be true if enough people believe in it.
I live out in the country. I don’t do TV, radio, newspaper¹ (including even general news websites—anything that’s important, I’ll probably hear about from siblings or parents). I don’t use any software with anything like banner ads. As for things like billboards, I know of one pair of billboards on the sides of a fish-and-chips shop in a town 40km away (Stawell)², one traffic safety billboard in a town 45km away (Avoca), a few in Ballarat, around 110km away, and finally loads in the big city 200–260+ km away, Melbourne.
Occasionally (increasingly rarely) I go down to Melbourne, where I grew up until I moved away six years ago. I hate it more and more each time I go down there, partly for things like traffic³, but much more for things trying to steal my attention, billboards, animated billboards, bright billboards, bright lights, flashing lights, &c. And this stuff has certainly got significantly worse in the last decade (I’ve written details a couple of other times here on HN).
Very rarely (like, once every year or two) I get exposed to a television in any form. I don’t know how people can tolerate them, the advertisements are just awful. If you forced me to sit down and look at them, I expect I would feel sick within a few minutes. And apart from a probable degree of autism⁴, there’s nothing particularly abnormal about me physiologically, save that I have become unaccustomed to these assaults upon the senses.
Very occasionally, I observe people using the web without an ad blocker, or use some mobile app (e.g. YouTube) and get exposed to ads thereby. Ugh. Very unpleasant stuff.
So your organic-looking paid articles and such, I don’t experience very much of them; just a few here on HN, and occasionally when I look at a mainstream news site for some weird reason, and a few sponsored articles from CSS-Tricks or Smashing Magazine which I’ll almost certainly immediately skip in my feed reader. But from the exposure I do get, I know that I hate billboards and their digital equivalents far, far more.
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¹ The local paper is called The Weekly Advertiser. I’ve measured it a few times, and it’s consistently been about 75% ads by surface area.
² I confess I’ve been tempted to go in and ask why and how they started doing it, and how much money they make out of it, out of sheer curiosity.
³ If I drive the 40km to Stawell, I might encounter fewer than a dozen vehicles.
⁴ Note that I’m here using present definitions of autism, which have shifted pretty extremely from what the word meant fifty years ago, when it strongly suggested low function (that is, that you really were disabled by it). In my experience, someone under the age of, say, thirty, will probably be willing to accept the word roughly how it’s used diagnostically now, while people over fifty will probably understand it in the older, more extreme, more probably debilitating sense. Nowadays, most of my family could probably get a formal diagnosis without too much difficulty, but none of us see anything to be gained by the endeavour. Funny fact, I believe this is the first time I’ve ever used the word “autism” online.
I mean it's what it says on the tin. We have a local "paper" but it's not a paper, it's just an advertising flyer, and sometimes it is useful if I want to look up something local.