Hive branding on cards and stuff is something you do when your a major company and you have money to blow. They never bring back the dollars that were put out. That's ALWAYS been the case and I agree that these things shouldn't be funded anymore from the DHF.
As for ads I don't mind it much if it's skipable after 5 seconds or is limited. I can understand that revenue has to be generated for both the platform and person producing the content. So I like the option to watch some ads (nothing too crazy) and then the option to pay to remove them is I want. What I don't like is the clear over spam of ads which actully is what's killed ads for the most part. I remember way back in the day you used to pay $5 -$10 for 1,000 impressions of a 468x60 banner ad lol. It's because it got results. People are becoming blind to such ads because there's just too many now.
What we need to do is use the DHF funds as an almost incubator for new applications that run on top of hive and offer new things to do with it.
Applications bring in users and those applications can have affiliate programs or just general marketing behind them. This benefits it two ways. The first is that most of these are friends or family or they have a way online to reach out to that person if they have question which trust me someone new to hive is going to have a lot of questions.
The second is development maybe hackathons where the application is decentralized and could become a new feature of hive. Offering up things like solid DeFi, games, swaps and yada yada like other chains have.
And the last is money talks. By reducing DHF selling pressure on the Hive token we can help to start getting it to recover. There's so much sell pressure and so little reason to honestly have hive yourself. If the token price goes up people are going to be more interested to get their hands on it because at the end of the day that's all anyone really cares about is making profits. So this is where ad revenue comes into play to help support the price and what's being paid out to people. It's a proven VERY successful way of doing things as you can see with youtube, facebook, x etc. These are multi billion dollar companies if not a trillion dollars with a TON going on.