“I’m utterly sympathetic to podcast hosts and entrepreneurs trying to fund their work,” said Jay Allison, producer of “The Moth Radio Hour,” a widely distributed radio show in which people tell true stories about themselves. “I confess, though, to feeling uncomfortable hearing public radio people in the role of pitch person for product, since I’m counting on them for something else.”

So-called native advertising — ads that echo the look or feel of journalism they accompany, like the one Ms. Chow helped create for Ford — has quickly gained currency at online news outlets. But native ads have perhaps no more traction than in audio journalism. On dozens of podcasts, hosts and reporters are responsible for producing news stories as well as advertisements.

“We try to make ads as compelling for the listener as the rest of the show,” said Matt Lieber, a co-founder of Gimlet Media, the company that produces “StartUp.” “We go to Ford and say, ‘What’s the most interesting thing about Ford?’ And that’s what we talk about in the podcast.”

The reliance on native ads has worked so far. For-profit podcast creators, which rely almost entirely on advertising for revenue, keep popping up, and Gimlet says it is breaking even. Networks like Gimlet; Panoply, from the online magazine Slate; and Midroll Media all started within the last three years. Last week, E. W. Scripps bought Midroll for a price the companies would not disclose. National Public Radio says its revenue from podcasting has tripled since 2013. Public Radio Exchange, another nonprofit podcast distributor, projects that sponsorship revenue — the majority of which comes from podcasts — grew ninefold from 2013 to 2015.

In ads, hosts often discuss their own experiences using a product. In “Theory of Everything,” a general-interest program on Public Radio Exchange, Benjamen Walker has talked about the virtues of mattresses made by Casper and of an online history class he took on the Great Courses — products he came to like after advertisers gave them to him.

Advertisers are naturally attracted to being associated with well-liked hosts. “When the host is personally reading the ad and telling a story about the product in her own words, it lands with the audience in a different and more authentic way than a traditional ad spot,” said Mark DiCristina, marketing director at MailChimp, an email marketing company that is one of the most prolific podcast advertisers.