Is the complementary ad model a complete tabu? Same as algorithms, I don't think it should be.

YouTube like client would be a great space for advertising other nostr projects and onboarding new nostriches.

What makes the ad-space trashy is either if you as a platform lean more into ad money vs ad quality (relevance); or malicious censorship (especially if you're a monopoly).

If you nurture your ad-space to be high quality first, highly curated links to complementary nostr services, it should work really well.

And if you start caving away from quality into being a sellout, nostriches will just stop sharing your links, and start sharing the competition's ones. Because, building a sustainable monopoly on nostr will be close to impossible.