I actually think that the current trend of "chasing eyeballs" is really valuable on its own terms.

Anyone who wants to start a business to support themselves, or their family will ultimately need customers, and as we continue to move away from the post-war era of people working principally for large companies which make things towards a services economy, a lot of people will need to find ways to communicate with their potential customers.

Lowering the cost of acquiring customers makes it much, much easier to start a new business, and to make it successful. Products and platforms that do so are generating real value on human terms.

My wife, for instance, is a photographer whose business is driven almost entirely by word of mouth, and twitter and facebook are both important components of enabling her network to share her work with potential clients. It would be enormously more expensive and difficult for her to run her business via traditional advertising, and would probably preclude her from running her own photography business.

tl;dr Chasing eyeballs makes small businesses easier to start and that's a real, human good.