Cap Watkins says goodbye to getting stuff for free — and celebrates a better way — in Death of the Free Web:

As a result, the web is becoming more localized, more niche. And what startups are beginning to realize is that they don’t need to be the next Facebook or Twitter or Google to achieve success and to grow a large, sustainable business. What they need to do is create products that connect with these small, but passionate groups of like-minded people. Instead of passionate users making up the minority of a product’s customers, the new goal is to make them the majority from the start. Because those passionate customers, it turns out, create even more passionate customers.

Cap gives some good examples as well. His post argues for a similar approach to what I discussed in Imagining a future without traditional marketing.

(link via @bokardo)