FTA: "If there is one thing more valuable than eyeballs it is data. If your system collects information that you can reasonably package into trend data, you have a great source of additional income."
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.
There are a large number of ways to utilize data from your web app to make money. It doesn't mean that you are selling user's account names, passwords, emails, or any identifying information. Trend data is very valuable in certain markets and there is no impact on the actual user in selling it.
Another way to sell the "data" is to use the information you know about your users and sell not only trends, but targeted advertisements based on your user data.
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.
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.