<< The free stuff was just a gimmick to earn brand/website loyalty >>
Alot of the free stuff was generated by hobbyists. Many review sites were started by people doing it on the side because they wanted to voice thier opinions. Many failed, a few managed to pull off profitability. You can't say that sites like "Stickdeath" were there to get brand loyalty. No, they were there because someone had something funny/disturbing/odd/original that people wanted to see and/or the author thought people might want to see. Many of the freeware apps are from people that had a use and didn't care about trying to make a buck. Maybe the program wasn't worth the hassle of support and sales but was worth placing on a website with a "here's something that's useful" message.
The internet was a land of soapboxes where anyone could stand up and speak thier mind, while at the same time anyone could walk away, ignore, or choose to listen to something else. Now every soapbox has a brand on it and a billboard behind it with neon lights, sometimes the speaker gets drowned out by the hum of the lights or the noise of the commercials over the PA system.
I'm just getting fed up with commercialism in general. The more they push, the more they push me away. I have bought many a thing off of pull based advertizing, but nothing off of push based.