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What is the market size for selling aggregated consumer shopping data (in $)?
Hello! Thank you for your question about the market size for selling aggregated consumer shopping data in US dollars. The most useful sources I found to answer your question were Accenture’s website and a 2014 Federal Trade Commission report on data brokers. The short version is I calculated the total revenue stream for data brokers to be approximately $435 billion, about 46% of which ($200 billion) comes from selling consumer data. Below you will find a deep dive of my findings.
METHODOLOGY
I began researching by conducting advanced Internet searches using a variety of key words and query types. The man sources I examined were academic databases, corporate websites, industry reports, government reports/databases and trusted media sites. I searched for the most recent information available and I confined the search results to the United States.
RESULTS
After conducting extensive searching, I found that current information on the market size in US dollars for selling aggregated consumer shopping data is very limited. The data provided is this report is the most recent available.
An article on Webpagefx.com details information on the data brokerage industry. It explains that the selling of consumer data is done by “data brokers”. The infographic in the article titled “What Is This Information Worth?” states the market size is estimated to be $200 billion, having grown from $150 billion in 2012. The leading professional services company Accenture has done research on the market to sell utility data. As part their 2016 report, they corroborate the overall market size of selling aggregated customer shopping data as “over $200 billion today”.
I used the CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) calculator at InvestingAnswers to determine the growth rate of the market from 2012 to 2016. Using the beginning value of $150 billion, an ending value of $200 billion and a period of 4 years, the CARG comes out to be 7.46% per year.
For a view of the larger picture, a 2012 article on BusinessResearcher says that approximately 46% of data brokers’ revenue comes from selling consumer data. Extrapolating this figure to the 2016 data, this would mean that the entire revenue stream for data brokers amounts to approximately $435 billion ($200 billion / 0.46). After extensive searching, this looks to be the most recent year a detailed study like this has been performed. Access to the article requires the creation of a login. There is no indication of any associated cost to create a login.
In May 2014, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) published a report titled “Data Brokers – A Call for Transparency and Accountability”. There is a wealth of information on the industry from research the FTC conducted. Among the interesting findings from the work has to do with how the data brokerage get their data. Data brokers provide data to people they call “end-users” but they also are a main source for other data brokers. The article says, “The nine data brokers studied obtain most of their data from other data brokers rather than directly from an original source. Some of those data brokers may in turn have obtained the information from other data brokers.” Overall, the researchers found that 7 of the 9 brokers provided data to each other.
Other interesting results from the 2012 FTC study had to do with the products the 9 data brokers in the study dealt with and their annual revenues. The study found the 3 main categories of data broker products were marketing, risk mitigation and people search. The annual revenue for each category was $196.2 million (marketing), $177.8 million (risk mitigation) and $52.7 million (people search).
CONCLUSION
To wrap it up, I calculated the total revenue stream for data brokers to be approximately $435 billion, about 46% of which ($200 billion) comes from selling consumer data.
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