The original quote itself is a fairly good example - he assumes that the networks produce something which is exactly what people want, whereas the networks should, ideally, produce something which the people most influenced by the advertising want; a different, less intelligent demographic. If he was speaking truth in the quote, he had to have underestimated intelligence of the average people.
Secondarily, if you want to instead argue from the success, you need to outline how and why underestimation of intelligence would be inconsistent with the success. Clearly, all around more complicated user interfaces also enjoyed huge success. I even give an explanation in my comment - people also tend to massively over-estimate the willingness of users to waste cognitive effort on their creations.
As for what lessons we can learn from it, it is perhaps that underestimating the intelligence is relatively safe for a business, albeit many failed startups began from a failure to properly explore the reasons why an apparent opportunity exists, instead explaining it with the general stupidity of others.
edit: also, you could likewise wish for a comparable bankruptcy to some highly successful but rather overcomplicated operating system.
he assumes that the networks produce something which is exactly what people want, whereas the networks should, ideally, produce something which the people most influenced by the advertising want; a different, less intelligent demographic
I'd be astonished if resistance to advertising increases linearly or better with IQ once you control for viewing time. Marketing's basically applied cognitive science, and one of the major lessons of the heuristics-and-biases field is that it's really hard to outsmart our biases.
Here's the new thread for posting quotes, with the usual rules: