The brilliance and innovation of the Steem platform, is that the advertising dollars can instead go to the people who are actually providing the content and the value that the advertisers are seeking.
This is exactly how it should be done. The STEEM blockchain won't survive without external sources of revenue. I've said this many times in the past and with the market in a downturn it's even more applicable now. The same goes for a lot of crypto's but we will see a lot of them die off in markets like this.
The apps which are being built will need to either source ad revenue, sell data or find other ways to earn money. STEEM itself is a share and can't survive unless their is a good product to give it investment value. Ads make sense as long as the money is distributed in the right way and the ads are discrete rather than invasive.