I was reading Cringely's post "Energy Crisis: It's Hard to Make a Buck When You Are Storing Everyone's Stuff for Free" that discusses infrastructure requirements for storing 2GB of information for every U.S. internet user.
Using his numbers it would probably cost under $50 million a year to run such a facility(a bit of license with his numbers perhaps-- he quotes $5 million electricity costs, $25 million hard drive costs -- I added $20 million of other "unspecified costs" without a lot of research of what they may be). Neither his or my estimate accounts for Kryder's Law. The hard drive costs should be one time but for ease of discussion assume the cost is every year.
If you imagine that the users could easily generate $1 of advertising revenue a year, that would generate $202 million revenue (using Cringely's 202 million U.S. internet user figures). You would make a very tidy profit.
Even if the "unspecified cost" estimate is 50% of what it should be and the $1 advertising revenue per user is twice what could be realized there is still potentially substantial profit to be had.
So maybe it is not to hard to make a buck (or 10's of millions).
