> The point of the article is that the money made by others must exceed the platform.

I'd posit that the economic value derived from Google's ad network, exceeds its own revenue from the ads by several fold at a minimum. The majority of the ad network value is going to the businesses that are doing the advertising.

Companies overall have used Google's advertising systems to such a massive degree, because the advertising measurably generates a greater sales/business return than the money they put into the ads. Google's ad network (which yes they ripped off from GoTo.com) was the first large scale advertising system in history to offer such an easy way to judge return on advertising spend. Previously neither radio, TV nor newspapers could offer the kind of instant information that Google ads could on performance (and often they didn't offer any accurate information at all, by which to judge advertising results). Businesses have been voraciously using it for all these years, because it has worked extremely well.