Hi Ruben,

you are totally right, the millions these companies spend surely add to the quality of the data.

We believe though that you can also achieve a high quality of data using the community (see Wikipedia) with the downside, that the process takes more time and that the data might not be 100% reliable in the short run (in the long run it is) as long as no one checked it. We have a review system in place though on our site that makes it very clear whether data has been checked by someone else, data quality is of course very important to us.

As for the monatarisation, we believe that it is not impossible to offer the data for free while still earning some money at some point (that you need in order to offer a minimum amount of support etc. — Wikipedia’s donation system is of course an idea, probably not ideal, but you can be much more creative here).