For the past 16 years, I've been monetizing 3rd party data (email) using PPL (pay per lead...lead generation) offers.
If you're not familiar with 3rd party data, it's email data that the users have given permission to receive messages from third parties. You get the opt-in record for all users and it's 100% can-spam compliant.
I either purchase the data or I get it through rev-share deals. Rev-share (revenue sharing) is data that you get for $0 upfront cost and you split the revenue generated from sending it, with the data provider.
The data is targeted based on specific vertical (niche) that the users have shown an interest in or requested more information about. So everything starts with the data, in that based on the vertical that you are getting data for, you then send a relevant offer.
I mainly get data that is targeted to verticals for PPL offers. This is because lead generation offers do not require a credit card or for the user to purchase anything to complete an offer. All a user has to do is fill out a form, so conversion rates are typically much higher than offers that require 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 best for me and tends to have the greatest amount of mass appeal (will be of interest to a very large general audience). So the potential to generate high volume exists and they are fairly easy to cross promote on the back-end.
The bulk of the offers that I promote pay $20-$40 per lead. I also promote offers that pay more and less, but the amount of the payout is not the key deciding factor. How well an offer converts can be just as important, if not more important. For example, you could have an offer that only pays $9. However, if it converts at 2X or better compared to a $20 offer, then it will perform about the same or possibly even better. You could also have an offer that pays $90, but if it converts poorly, it may not even be worth sending it.
Bottom line, it is far easier to get someone to fill out a short form than it is to get them to take out their credit card and make a purchase. So why struggle trying to make sales, when you can just provide free info that users want / need and get paid well doing it.
Some of the verticals that I have done extremely well with are: insurance, education, debt, credit, mortgage, loans, assistance, discount offers, homeowner offers, etc...
So for example, if I'm getting auto insurance data, I then send an auto insurance offer. If I'm getting education data, then I send an education offer, etc, etc... Then after a certain amount of time, I then cross promote the offers to fully monetize the data.
Important note: 3rd party data will rarely be as responsive as a highly targeted opt-in list you build yourself. But it really doesn't matter. Because you are getting the data much much cheaper and it is highly scalable compared to building your own list. The way that you make it work is to always be segmenting your opens / clickers - removing the unresponsive user. That way over time you are building smaller, but much more responsive lists. Essentially you are converting the data from quantity to quality.
Basically, I monetize the data using PPL offers because they offer the path of least resistance to generating conversion and converting the data to cash producing assets.
Obviously, there is far more to it, but done right it can be extremely profitable. Everyone that I know that is in the business and knows what they are doing, for the most part, does 6-7 figures. While that may sound like a huge range, much comes down to one's abilities to scale and to cost effectively build/manage the infrastructure needed to scale.
Monetizing data isn't for everyone and it takes money to make money, but it's something to think about.
