

Ask HN: The data revenue model - instakill

Yipit is a daily deals site that sells their data to institutions: http://yipit.com/data/pricing/<p>I was wondering what other consumer-facing sites you know of have a similar revenue model?
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achompas
Off the top of my head:

\-- Factual (<http://www.factual.com/>), who I really, really like because
they want to develop an "open data platform"

\-- Wolfram Alpha (<http://products.wolframalpha.com/developers/>) licenses
their super-amazing API

\-- Twitter (through Gnip) licenses their data to users
(<http://gnip.com/twitter>)

Now, in my opinion this kind of business model is awesome for a few reasons:

1\. It's not glamorous. No one says "whooooo I want to develop a data API and
license it!" Everyone is too busy developing a Facebook for cats or whatever.

2\. It's really, really useful. If you work with data in any capacity, you
know that an API for said data is much better than scraping data from HTML.
Even the HTML-parsing modules in Python/Ruby/Perl, which are friendly relative
to raw HTML + regexes, are brutal.

3\. It's super-interesting. The world has _so much unstructured data_ , and
yet this market is (almost) untapped! There is data on almost anything you can
think of -- health care records, pedestrian/vehicular/retail traffic, food
consumption -- and you'd only need some thought, maybe a few data-collecting
tools, and an API to make it useful.

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ig1
Ebay do via Terapeak

