I have been monetizing purchased data(email) for over 16 years.
I'm not a fan of scraped data, as you will almost certainly scrape spam traps and many of the addresses are likely to bounce. This will kill your chances of being able to successfully send the list as the IPs you send on, will quickly become blacklisted / blocked. Plus, scraped data isn't allowed under can-spam, if your sending to US users. So at a bare minimum if you insist on sending it, I would get it cleaned by a email hygiene company, to at least help reduce the risks.
The smarter way to make money mailing is to buy data where the users have provided permission to receive third party messages. Plus, this way you aren't spamming. That's not to say you will never get a spam complaint. But if you ever get asked for the opt-in record because of a complaint, you can provide it. Which you can never do with scraped data, so you will never be able to scale your business and make any real money.
In addition, the best way to monetize data is by sending free or almost free offers. The way that I do it is...
I heavily promote PPL (pay per lead...lead generation) offers, because there is no credit card / purchase required to complete an offer. All a user has to do is fill out a form to get paid. So conversion rates are typically much higher. I also promote free sign-ups(dating for example) and free trails(weight loss, ecig, etc...). Lastly, I promote a limited number of offers that are 100% purchase. Theses usually will have some form of savings related to something very popular, be something unique/novelty or solve a house is on fire type problem. These offers are more of an impulse buy. In the end, all the offers that I promote have mass appeal...will be of interest to a very large audience, because it helps increase my conversions and also makes it easier to cross promote the offers.
So the key is to promote offers that have mass appeal that are mainly free or almost free offers, but still pay well. This offers the path of least resistance to getting conversions and turning the data into cash producing assets.
Now, there is more involved than just getting data and mailing offers, but it really does work. Everyone that I know that is in the business and knows what they are doing, does 6-7 figures. Granted that's a huge range, but much comes down to ones ability to scales and effectively manage the infrastructure that comes with scaling.
Anyway, something to think about.
