Data Monetization

Seduced by stories of the success of Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc some organisations gravitate towards data monetization thinking that they have an untapped pool of money in their business and that it is pretty easy to just package up and sell their data.

To be able to charge for your data you need to know what financial value to attach to it. And although everyone seems to agree that data has value, it is not a simple exercise to agree on what the actual monetary value is.

The key point is, your data needs to be valuable to your end customer.

Let’s think about what you would expect from a provider of data because that is what your customers will expect from you. As a provider of data, there are a few aspects to consider before charging your customers for the data, including:

Data expectations (Click to expand)

Is your data like this? And if you are one of the lucky few where it is, does it fill a gap in someone’s offering that they are willing to pay for?

Data Monetization Exception

It’s not easy to monetize your data and can often be a distraction from the areas where you really can use data to drive value. As we mentioned briefly before, it is usually improving decision-making or improving operations where the majority of organisations start.

The exceptions to this rule are organisations where data is their core product. These data-focused organisations, often start-ups, know that the data they are gathering has value and have designed this into their proposition from the beginning. But with increasing regulation, and competition, there is still a lot to consider.

We will explore data Value in more detail in week 4 of this course.

Ethical responsibility

At the very least you should be considering legislation like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation when you are monetizing data. If you have the capability to monetize data, you need to do it ethically and within the bounds of your local data privacy laws – you can’t simply take customer data and sell it without the right permissions.