That and market share. Between 2007 and now, a website could reliably grow as new people got connected to the internet and as internet usage naturally grew. Up till recently, a large proportion of people either didn’t use the internet at all, or had the internet, but didn’t use much. Prior to 2020 I knew lots of friends and family who simply did not own a home computer or maybe had like one laptop for the whole family (and a bunch of phones).

During that era, the attention was all on getting new users in the door. Make a good, cheap/free product, and people will come, if you make the best site, people will find you.

But NOW, most people already are using the internet like 14 hours a day and have become full netizens and companies are already gigantic monopolies (Youtube does’t have a viable competitor, for example). If companies want to keep growing, they can’t rely on new blood, they need to pivot to harvesting more from the people they already have.