Data Monetization

Monetization is about generating benefit/ revenue/ profit from anything.

‘Data Monetization is about generating revenue from Data.’

In this era, social media is a very dominant channel to interact with customers. Platforms like WhatsApp, Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram etc. all provide free services to their customers. Have you ever noticed, if you are not paying a single penny to them then how they are generating money and how they are running their business?

The response to the above is by Data Monetization. They sell the data that’s generated by their customers. Having said that, please note, there are regulations that they can’t share personal details of their customers with anyone. But that doesn’t mean they can’t sell how many people are viewing what, how many are buying, how many are spending how much on which product category, from which location they are logged in etc.

For example, on Amazon, customers can buy anything they like. Now at the back end, Amazon must be recording what you are buying and what you are selling. Based on this Information, they can very well analyze which product is more viewed on their portal or what is the buying trend of a particular set of products in a particular season. Like, in December, they can see the trend of products related to Christmas are in great demand. They can sell information like WHICH & HOW MANY PRODUCTS WILL BE IN DEMAND IN COMING DECEMBER based on last few years trend to the product owner to plan their production. This information is GOLD for product owners, they can plan their raw material, work force, timeline and many more activities.

Like above example, there are N number of monetization opportunities which can be generated if organizations are able to store, process and analyze high quality data.

Please note, Data Monetization is the end-product, there are many measures required if a company is serious about monetizing their data. To achieve that one must have Data Governance, Data Quality, Master Data Management, Metadata Management, Data Lineage, Data Dictionary, Business Glossary etc. in-place.

Few methods to generate or increase revenue from data.

• With proper data management one can reduce operation cost
• Providing quality data to marketing, sales and other departments which can assist them to generate more business.
• Data As A Service can be made available to clients via API or online data.
• Insight As A Service can be provided on a monthly or annual basis in aggregation or KPIs basis rather raw data via API or Website/ Mobile applications.
• Analytics As A Service with prediction and forecasting can also be sold using complex ML models.

It seems, soon Data Monetization will become the largest monetization channel for every organization.