Death of the Free Web | Cap Watkins: “I’ve actually been noticing this transition in SV for the past year or so. More and more startups are focusing on revenue right out of the gate. The old way of trying to build gigantic user-bases and then sell their eyeballs to advertisers is falling by the wayside. There are certainly still exceptions, but right now they are just that – exceptions. Seeing a startup go after paying customers used to be like catching a glimpse of a unicorn. Now, it’s the…

Why Wall Street unfriended Facebook – The Globe and Mail: “Welcome to the tech industry’s summer of sober second-thought. For an unusually large number of Web and social media darlings, these past few months have been a harsh lesson in how quickly the stock market can turn nasty.” (Via. The Globe and Mail) Repeat after me: Ads cannot fund giant companies indefinitely. Eventually, the advertisers always figure out that their ad buys are essentially worthless, and they all pull out, rendering the service unsustainable. They move on to the next…

I keep hearing around the web from people I respect that App.net is cool, but that it won’t survive unless it hits critical mass. That social networks in general have to have millions and millions of users, or they don’t work. The reason people believe this is that just about every social network up to this point has been financed by advertising (or not financed at all). If you want to run a service on ads, you need as many eyeballs as possible to cover your nut.…

> Our relationship with the web is going to be undergoing a fundamental shift over the next decade, I suspect, because it *has* to undergo a shift. Historically, we’ve paid for television, movies, books, and magazines, and in many cases we pay for those things even when they contain ads—and we pay a premium for magazines and TV shows that are ad-free. But apparently we believe that when you Just Add Internet, only greedy people would keep asking for money, because everything is subsidized by magical money-shitting ponies. via…

> Twitter will get to a billion members,” Evan Williams, Twitter’s co-founder and former chief executive officer, said Monday, echoing a goal set by Facebook. Williams didn’t elaborate on a time frame. via [sfgate.com](http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2010/10/13/BUVC1FRMB2.DTL&feed=rss.news)There are roughly 7 billion people on the planet. 1in 7 can’t possibly have Twitter accounts. What Twitter will have soon is 1 billion accounts, which is not the same thing. I have two Twitter…