This is one of the most difficult marketing channels for marketers to promote. It basically requires astroturfing (e.g. planting biased questions on social platforms and encourage organic engagement).
I hate to admit this but this is how I got the first 10-20 paid users for my B2B SaaS. Our product is a dev tool that integrates with a bunch of other tools, so we found questions from people on forums asking how to accomplish [what our product does] and we'd answer the question with a post recommending our service.
And then we wrote a bunch of tutorials / guides for how to integrate [popular service] <> [our product] to achieve [what our product does] so that if anyone googles "[popular service] [what our product does]" our help docs are usually top of the page.
Posting on forums was fine to get the first few users, but it was long-tail SEO (which is pretty easy to rank since it's long-tail) that got us the next 200. If the search terms are specific enough and the category is relatively undiscovered/unexploited, it's easy to rank. Unfortunately it's really hard to find unexploited niches.
Yup. I avoid every single ad I can on principle. Only exception I used to make was for youtube sponsors, mostly out of laziness, until I finally installed sponsorblock.
I've gotten so good at it that at this time I haven't the faintest idea of what movies are there to see at the cinema. Not a single one.
I'm probably a very extreme case in actually having succeeded in disconnecting myself from popular culture to a very large extent.
I might hear about about something interesting on social media or a podcast, but won't remember it until I see a picture on the streaming platform months later, when it's already been canceled for lack of viewers.
Youtube is actually the only place I actively block all ads, because they seem unable to stop spamming me with android games that are nothing like the ads at all and are unbelievably annoying. Most websites and stuff I'll let them show ads by default, then block the site if they have more ads than content etc. Although I also just try to avoid those sites in the first place.
Marketers have this notion that people are all merely 24/7 product-consumers, constantly on the lookout to discover new products to consume, and as long as their "message" reaches my brain, it's an unambiguously good thing for both parties.
When I'm browsing the web, or driving to work, or watching a show, or trying to complete some basic task around my life, I'm definitely not trying to discover your product. I wish marketers would stop assuming I am. If I want to look for an unknown product, I'll deliberately go out and do so. In that case, and only in that case, ads are welcome.
(People forget that humans invented the advertising industry precisely to shield civilization from this kind of "word of mouth".)
High Fidelity, sort of. Failed commercial project to develop a sort of VR world from the same guy that made Second Life. Their advertising honestly cheesed me off and seemed to reek of desperation. Their adoption of cryptocurrency didn't help either. What did was that despite that they had promising technology people I knew talked about, so I did check it out despite all my initial misgivings, and it was good enough for me to stick around there for a good while. When they gave up, I was part of the group of people that tried to keep things going, which eventually became a non-profit I'm now a member of, https://overte.org/
Resonite. The new version of NeosVR, still in development. Happened after an ideological split. I heard of NeosVR mostly from Reddit discussion and friends who love the system.
Linux Weekly News. Only news site I pay for, they post interesting highly technical information. Pretty sure I heard them mentioned in Linux discussion spaces.
Linode -- Same deal, Linux users that use their services. Now it's much bigger, I signed up back in the early days, back when they used User-mode Linux, and had no SSDs.