A New Source of Revenue for Data Scientists: Selling Data!

It is perhaps in the nature of our society that as soon as a task, profession or new idea is deemed important, those who created it or are engaged in it feel dissatisfied.

If it is that significant, that essential to human progress, the thinking usually goes, I should be making more money at it.

Big Data has become that thing, that new new force at the juncture of technology and business that is expected to propel the economy forward and which no successful enterprise should be without.

The people who generate, assemble, analyze, cross-reference, interpret and otherwise make such data presentable to mere mortals are called, imaginatively, data scientists. And, as the following article suggests, not content with their lot - and who would be! - they are thinking hard about how to cash in. After all, the Big Data movement is all of, like,  about seven months old. So how come those who know how to do this stuff aren't rich yet?

The issue of who makes money from data is already a contentious one. For starters, much of the really useful stuff comes from consumers themselves. Free. And then it is turned into wisdom which enables the institutions who buy it to turn around and sell what they have learned back to said consumers. Or to use the information in ways that entice, inveigle or opportune those data providers to spend more of their income thanks to the insights their very own data has provided to marketers.

Based on this, one might assume that the consuming public would be telling the data scientists to get in line and stop bitching. But that is not our way. First, we are conflicted about this: there are all those touchy privacy issues about who owns, should have access to, should be able to control and otherwise manipulate that wondrous raw material. So many are wondering who these people are and whether we really want them mucking around in our increasingly merged real and online lives. More importantly, however, we are trying to figure out how to cash in ourselves, so anything these dudes can do, the rest of us want to do, too. Evidently, if it isnt for sale, it isnt for real. JL

Vincent Granville comments in DataScience Center:

What kind of data is salable?
How can data scientists independently make money by selling data that is automatically generated: raw data, research data (presented as customized reports), or predictions. In short, using an automated data generation / gathering or prediction system, working from home with no boss and no employee, and possibly no direct interactions with clients. An alternate career path that many of us would enjoy! There are a number of companies selling cured or even raw data:

• Web traffic statistics to allow advertisers to compare publishers to buy the most efficient traffic, or to help pricing a web site, and for competitive intelligence in general. Compete.com, Alexa.com and Quancast.com are three examples. They also provide demographics and keyword data for the millions of websites that they track.
• Salary data and jobs trends, for thousands of occupations. Companies such as Payscale.com, Glassdoor.com and Indeed.com gather salary data from millions of visitors and job postings. Such job reports can also be used for economic forecasting or stock trading models.
• Keyword lists, with number of impressions, clicks and average cost-per-click, as well as related keywords, to help advertisers purchase more and better keywords. Google offers this service via an API. It is not free.
• Black lists and white lists of IP addresses or email addresses used in fraud, Botnet activity or forum spam. An example of company selling this type of data is ProjectHoneyPot.org, with data based on consumer reports an other sources.
• Home values (real and estimated) for all houses in US, see Zillow.com.
• Pricing for all standard medical procedures, for each hospital (real and estimated). This is actually a good idea for a big data start-up.
• Stock market data, consumer reviews (Yelp.com), lists of thousands of job titles for data scientists (we are working on this), and so on
• Your predictions (we sold stock market trading signals in the past, available via an API, and the service was not free).
• Selling scores, such as click scores or any other scores. FICO was one of the first companies to do so.

Do you have other ideas, as well as ideas to inexpensively collect massive amounts of data to produce and sell scores or predictions, or just simply to sell the data that you gathered?
Big Data Sets Available For Download

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