When it comes to data, be a user, not a dealer

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This infographic by SEER Interactive is one of the most shared graphics over the past week. As of 10:40pm CST on Monday October 8th, it has 4200 likes on Facebook, 3100 Tweets, and 290 G+ shares.  Impressive, but not shocking because this infographic is pretty cool.

To get the full effect, I cannot embed the infographic here – you have to see it for yourself: http://rcs.seerinteractive.com/money/.  SEER Interactive examines how some of our favorite tech companies make money, or if they do at all. There are some interesting findings.

Of all of the 47 tech companies studied, only one makes money selling data:  LinkedIn.  The rest of the companies actually making money are using data. The most popular money making data-based endeavors are:

  • Application Design – 21 companies
  • Subscribers – 20 companies
  • Advertising – 17 companies

The less popular money making endeavors:

  • Ecommerce – 4 companies
  • Lead Gen / Affiliate marketing – 2 companies
  • Hardware – 2 companies

I’m not about to say that Ecommerce, Lead Gen, and Hardware focused companies are not data driven.  There probably isn’t a company, much less an industry that isn’t data driven these days, but there are differences in terms of how much data is generated and used.  When you think about App Design, Subscription based services, and Advertising, they are utilizing data as soon as they acquire it. Every new app, every feature of a service we subscribe to, each and every advertising message we are presented with are all based on data we most likely have provided in one way or another.

So it’s not how much data you have or how valuable it may be perceived. It’s all about the velocity in which you put it to work to create something of real value. Sometimes, that something of real value is fleeting, and those companies that match the velocity of data utility with the velocity of data creation will ultimately win.

Related Posts:

The intersection of BYOD, Cloud, and Big Data

[Chart] The Location of Data is Changing

There’s Data in them there hills!

2012-10-09T09:20:33+00:00

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