The real economy is the only one that has value (the one where the goods and services are produced). Facebook uses it's platform to gather people and it gives a place where the companies that produce those goods and services can showcase them with advertisement.

By itself I don't see anything wrong with that. The problem with the Facebook's of the world is that it takes all the value generated by having a large group of people in one place and keeps all of it to itself.

Youtube shares part of their revenue with the content creators but problem with them is that it's entirely up to their discretion and they can shut you out whenever they want.

If we do not connect the apps built on top of the steem blockchain to the real economy then we are only relying on speculation to give value to the token. Might as well go to a casino or play the lottery.

Now, advertisement is one way of connecting steem to the outside world. Another way could be to build an app that is used in the real world that requires recources credits. But the app needs to have a real use case in the outside world.

Steemit Inc is a private company and if they choose to use advertisement to fund their operations I am ok with that. If another entity goes a different route I have no problem with that either. Steem is an open protocol and no one needs to ask permission to build anything on top of it.

Steem is not Steemit so it's not the end of the world if they have adds on their site. Besides you can always block them, use tor, brave browser and/or a vpn if you need to have a little bit more privacy.