Because they make the product worse to gate working features behind a paywall without spending development time and money. It’s the opposite of innovation, it’s going backwards. The parasite class (investors) reward that behavior with more investment because now the company has increased profits by selling the working used-to-be-free features at a premium. They couple that with buybacks and layoffs to juice the stock price … and then discard the husk of a company and start a new one

It means they can make people see more ads.