If we're cutting it down to "payment for expertise" then surely, people pay $100+ an hour for legal advice every day, which could be seen as a FAQ service of sorts. In the more direct sense there are websites where you can get paid to write papers, review resumes, pen informational blogs and etc. Anyway, having not ventured into this myself I'm not trying to comment on either case more accurately reflecting reality one way or another, it just seems at odds that smart people who have run businesses for more than a minute see no end value in patents but you've found the process quite easy. Given that things of this nature are rarely intuitive it could very well be there is a good channel through the swamp that is not immediately apparent and could use some navigation buoys.
