I don't think this is quite true. I posit that only a minority of people will be satisfied with the most popular option when there are a large number of options

I don't think this is quite true. I posit that only a minority of people will be satisfied with the most popular option when there are a large number of options. If your category is 'all viewers', the most popular choice will be poor for the majority, because 'all viewers' is too diverse. You need better categorization of the viewers before you can meaningfully suggest content beyond 'shovel more of this profitable content'. It is starting to happen with the 'people who liked X also liked Y' categories, but is still pretty poor (eg. recommending content a user hates without giving the user a way to teach the system that they hate that content or why they hate it). Machine learning would be a nice solution, but doesn't seem to scale to large numbers of users.