What's dead is the marketing model of impersonal e-commerce. The dotcoms that now litter the landscape were built on the concept of automated marketing. The idea was to build a site and let the site do all the work. No human interaction was involved. The problem is that computers do not make purchases.
People make purchases.
Furthermore, they only buy from people they know, trust and with whom they share common interests. Most people are not that comfortable with machines. They don't trust them and have nothing in common with them. On the other hand, the Internet is the best tool ever invented for education and communication. You can learn anything about anything on the Internet.