Am I the only one who finds this suggestion an apalling way to go about making money? It seems that if your startup is doing this, it deserves to go out of business.
Think about Myspace and Facebook. They have a ton of information about their users (and a statistically relevant amount of info about the general population as well). The magic is that they can sell ads to men between the ages of 18-21 who are in a state college and earn less than $30,000 per year. Not many companies have access to that amount of information about their users.
Compete Quantcast iTunes Music Store Amie Street Alexa
all built models on their data.
The slickest (if not sickest) example of this that comes to mind: www.gracenote.com
Thousands of users manually entered label/track/artist information, helping to build a massive commercial (read: license fee) CD Title database
http://www.wired.com/entertainment/music/commentary/listenin...