[gsaines]

I wouldn't bet on it. Making money in the academic institutional licensing world is tough, especially if you are marketing something that doesn't impact bottom-line figures for people who are concerned. Arguably this use case is as far removed from bottom line value adds as possible. In an optimal world you have a killer app that reduces University lead COA by 30% or something, but this would have to grow organically (so a lot of direct sales approaches are no good).

A friend of mine has been doing a lot of direct sales (quite successfully I might add) to institutions, but the reason he's making money is that his target audience is already doing a lot of number crunching, they have big budgets, and he's directly saving them cash. Something like this is probably a "nice to have" feature that would be near impossible to convince the school to pay for, to speak nothing of a worthy price tag (greater than $2k/yr for instance).

I sounds like a fun project, but I would not expect it to pay much, if anything. And an ad model's monthly revenue would be a joke.