[cryptica]

This intense competition over eyeballs is driven by the monetary system. Money printing creates a supply side economy (demand-constrained, as opposed to supply-constrained).

All companies just produce as many goods and services as they can using all the financing which is available to them. The biggest challenge in a supply side economy is finding customers to buy the goods which the company produced or plans to produce. It increases competition on the customer-acquisition side and reduces competition on the production side (I.e. quality goes down). It makes it almost impossible for small companies to compete.

The money printing acts as a kind of subsidy for big corporations (and regular citizens end up paying via inflation). Companies which are not subsidized cannot compete no matter how good their products are or how efficient they are at producing them. They can never get the same profit margins as big corporations due to the lack of subsidies. Subsidies from the money printer can come in the form of government grants, overly generous government contracts or from banks in the form of very low interest loans. It's an asymmetric playing field.