[tzs]

I could understand this if it were about Google's old CAPTCHA that used scans from books and could use the user input to improve an OCR system, or Cloudflare's CAPTCHA that asks you to click the pictures that contained traffic lights or bikes or whatever where the user input can be used to improve an image classification system.

Better OCR and better image classifies are things you can make money with.

It is not clear to me how one makes money from a "what way is this animal pointing?" classifier (especially since building that CAPTCHA requires them to have a photo of the animal where they already know it is pointing close to 0, 60, 90, 150, 210, or 270 degrees).

This seems to be a task that likely only be of interest as part of a CAPTCHA and so the most that your solving it for will do is improve the CAPTCHA. It's not like OCR or image recognition where you might be improving some separate money making product of theirs.