I have been doing the same thing for the past 16+ years.
I monetize purchased / rev-share data(email) using PPL offers.
With PPL (pay per lead...lead generation) offers there is no credit card / purchase required to complete an offer. All a use has to do is fill out a form, so conversion rates are typically much higher than offer that requires a sale to be made.
I favor offers that have a make, get or save money benefit to them. This is what has overall worked the best for me and tend to have the greatest mass appeal (of interest to a large general audience) and are fairly easy to cross promote.
Some of the verticals that I have done extremely well with are: insurance, education, mortgage, credit, debt, loans, homeowner offers, etc...
The bulk of the offers I promote pay $20-$40 per lead. However. I promote other that pay more and less. The payout is not the key factor. How wellan offer converts is just as important,if not more. If you have an offer that pays $9 and it converts at 2X+ of a $20 offer, it's going to perform about the same. If you have an offer that pays $90 and it converts poorly, it may not even be worth running.
To generate traffic, I purchase fresh / targeted data and match the data to a relevant offer. So if I have life insurance data, I'm going to promote a life insurance PPL offer. If I have education data, then I'm going to promote an education PPL offer. Then it's just a matter of cross promoting offers. Rev-share data is no different, except there is $0 upfront cost to acquire and I split the revenue generated from sending it with the list providers.
Additionally, by acquiring data, I'm building assets that I then own and can market to over and over at low cost, compared to what most marketers do. Which is to pay for traffic or use some free strategy that often ends up failing or wasn't worth the time to implement.
Basically, I'm monetizing data using PPL offers, because they offer the path of least resistance to generating conversions and convert the data into cash producing assets.
Obviously there is a lot more to it and it's not for everyone. However, done right it can be extremely profitable. Everyone that I know that is in the business and knows what they are doing, most are doing 6-7 figures (depending on what stage they are at). While that's a huge range, much comes down to one ability to scale and effectively manage / build the infrastructure needed to scale.
Anyway, something to think about.