Here's a hypothetical counterpoint to your proposition here: A search company makes money from ads, which are unobtrusive text links which are clearly separate

Here's a hypothetical counterpoint to your proposition here: A search company makes money from ads, which are unobtrusive text links which are clearly separated from search results. The search company is forever trying to improve metrics, and in this quest, it pushes more intrusive monitoring of users, and the adverts become more and more like search results at the top of their results. According to their metrics, this is a winning move - more and more people are clicking ads, and advertisers love the stats on users. The search company slowly starts to lose users, because they don't like the privacy issues and the intrusive ads in their search, even if more people click on them. A few years later, the search company starts to lose its dominance of the field and hence all the money they made from more and more ads is now drying up, but every change they make to increase clicks on ads is actually having a worse effect on usage a few months down the line, even if it helps their metrics in the short term. No-one notices because the users have always been there, and this is not a primary metric or one that is easily correlated with changes. Was this a good strategy? It was certainly a local maximum, and all the numbers went up, but was it in their long term interests? I agree for someone like Google or FB the metric which is important is selling ads (that is their business after all), but both companies actually have two sets of users - one set are the users who read the ads, and one set are the advertisers - both are vitally important to their brand and continuing profit. Only one of those is represented in the advert CTR metric, and only one directly makes money, but both are vitally important to continuing profits. Now you can change your metrics to try to measure user retention, but happiness and satisfaction are notoriously slippy concepts, and people often don't even know what they want before they see it and use it for a while (e.g. users of yahoo or one of the other portals would not have voted for changes to make it more like google), people hate any change, and haters are the most vocal. All those things completely skew any attempt to get numbers on customer satisfaction.