No. They should be raising money just like other businesses do, by going public and through small amounts of debt (if needed). In crypto space, going public is equivalent to an ICO. If they want to raise money from stock market, they should go for IPOs. Then, they can offer their own retail products or charge companies for their services (they can offer them support for integrating a few services with Steem blockchain or promote their posts, which would have the same effects as advertising, but it won’t collect personal data like google adsense). I oppose online advertising only because of privacy concerns. I don’t want my data to be fed to AI and governments/terrorists/hackers.
RE: Testing Ads on Steemit.com