That's called brand and in one way or the other, in postindustrialized societies most people seem to work in that field (e.g. everything that is funded by ads is effectively part of the supply chain).
"The value is in the user base" is just a particularly sticky form of brand, nothing else, set least as long as there are no long term contracts involved. It's not in knowing their logs, it's not in having their authentication hashes, it's not even in exclusivity (I believe that most users of anything in the wildly overlapping spectrum from chat to instance messenger to screen sharing conference call are active on quite a lot of offerings)
"The value is in the user base" is just a particularly sticky form of brand, nothing else, set least as long as there are no long term contracts involved. It's not in knowing their logs, it's not in having their authentication hashes, it's not even in exclusivity (I believe that most users of anything in the wildly overlapping spectrum from chat to instance messenger to screen sharing conference call are active on quite a lot of offerings)