Am I the only one annoyed by using zaps for advertising purposes?
To me, the goal of a zap is to show my sincere appreciation to someone who took the time to write something informative, useful, entertaining, stimulating, etc.
Using zaps in this way is certainly legitimate, but it undermines their original purpose. Doesn't it? 
I’ll take their sats. 😬
I tried it once long ago when I created my first Nostr pinboard. But I agree with you, organically would be better. Due of that I just discovered Firefish which I am looking into now. Maybe I can have a referral code?
Keeping the Nostr Ethos would maybe that hard as keeping the WWW ethos of Tim Berners-Lee https://om.co/2012/09/10/tim-berners-lee-remember-the-ethos-of-the-web/ . I am from that early days, and now its mostly big-tech that is visible to the mainstream. Developing apps such as FireFish and nostr:npub13ue6qxwf23vjkw6lu6pkykx06q6tkvmwcgm2f7jtnkwjc42ahmyqwuxn33 as FOSS on the Nostr protocol and decentralized relays might help. It's still a hard and long way to go, but hopefully stacking BTC and the ethos might give some freedom to do this.
100%
(Sending you the Firefish referral code via DM, thanks!)
I‘ve been pondering this question as well. Where I end up is that in contrast to email marketing (which is free and infinitely scalable) zapvertising requires proof of work and brilliantly showcases the spam prevention concept from HashCash. So the marketer must target potential customers that are more likely to gain value from an ad to not waste money. Feels more like a win-win scenario to me than current marketing models.
Zapvertising is indeed an improvement over traditional marketing techniques. But still ...
Right now the targeting looks pretty random, probably due to the limited size of the Nostr audience.
Hopefully, going forward the target definition will improve and I will appreciate the usefulness of the zapped ads that will be sent to me.
Yeah it‘s early days. I also assume that as sats are priced appropriately over the coming years that signal-to-noise goes up too.
I agree that it's annoying, but it a problem really easy to solve: just let the client/wallet filter the notification, and maybe the visualization, by amount.
