I hope this once and for all puts the nail in the coffin of the hand-wavy "we'll collect info that is super valuable to someone else and sell it to them" busine

I hope this once and for all puts the nail in the coffin of the hand-wavy "we'll collect info that is super valuable to someone else and sell it to them" business model. Sure, if you can collect enough of it cheaply enough and sell it cheaply enough to someone that can monetize it directly (e.g. selling demographics info to ad networks for targeting) you might make it. But if you're collecting this info at any sort of significant cost, then you have to be able to monetize it yourself. Otherwise the 'purchaser' will just gladly tell you in meetings how much they'll pay for the data, when in reality it's just a super low risk way for them to see if this data holds any value for them - if it does, they'll figure out their own way of collecting it and cut you out of the equation. And more likely, it'll turn out not to be valuable (or it'll turn out their organization isn't capable of acting on it) and they'll just back out again.