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The Motley Fool use to be a free service for the individual investors to research stocks and the stock market, learn about personal finance and discuss issues on their forums without commercialization. Then they started to offer "premium" content, i.e. their stock picks for a nominal fee. Then they started to market their stock picks in different newsletters to their paying customers. Next they started charging a monthly fee to use the discussion forums. If you read their early investing and personal finance books as well as the early posts in their forums, they spoke out for the individual investor doing his own diligence.
They were instrumental in getting some of the SEC regulations passed that leveled the playing field for the individual investor versus the institutional investors (no more advanced 10-K reports to the big firms, all filings had to available to the public at the same time, no directing information to a favorite analyst, etc.) Now they are just commercial and mainstream.