The Ultimate Guide to Data Marketplaces in 2024

Data marketplaces have emerged as a powerful platform for organizations to exchange, monetize and acquire vast troves of data. As global data creation explodes to over 180 zettabytes by 2025 (IDC), data marketplaces provide a scalable way to tap into this wealth of data. This comprehensive guide provides everything you need to know to successfully leverage data marketplaces.

What Exactly is a Data Marketplace?

A data marketplace is an online hub where data providers can publish datasets they want to commercialize, while data consumers can subscribe to or purchase access to data assets for their business needs.

According to Gartner, the defining characteristics of a data marketplace include:

• Self-service model for finding, understanding and acquiring data
• Standardized licensing models, security and governance
• Flexible pricing options including subscriptions, consumption-based, fixed fee etc.
• Data aggregation from diverse sources into one unified platform

Leading public cloud providers including AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud have all launched managed data marketplace offerings where clients can discover, purchase and integrate third-party data. However, there are also dozens of industry-specific data marketplaces run by specialized providers.

The most common categories of data available on marketplaces are:

• Financial data – Stock prices, earnings reports, credit histories, macroeconomic trends
• Business/marketing data – Firmographic data, technographics, consumer demographics
• Location data – Geographic, foot traffic patterns, real estate
• Transportation data – Shipping routes, vehicle telemetry, traffic patterns
• Retail and ecommerce data – Inventory, pricing, consumer buying behavior
• Scientific data – Weather data, clinical trial data, genomic data
• User-generated data – Social media posts, reviews, volunteer location data
• IoT and sensor data – Real-time streams from connected devices and industrial sensors

Data marketplaces eliminate the need for complex one-to-one negotiations between data providers and consumers. Instead they act as a centralized storefront that handles licensing, payments and delivery of data assets through self-service.

This creates a win-win ecosystem that opens up new revenue opportunities for data holders while accelerating innovation for data users.

The Explosive Growth of Data Marketplaces

Several key factors are fueling exponentially rising adoption of data marketplaces across industries:

Proliferation of Data Volume and Sources

• Global data volume is expected to grow from 45 zettabytes in 2019 to 180 zettabytes by 2025. (IDC)
• Unstructured data like video will make up 95% of this data volume as sensors, smartphones, apps and IoT devices boom. (IDC)
• Organizations struggle to manage and extract value from this firehose of both internal and external data.

Recognition of Data as a Strategic Asset

Data is becoming the world‘s most valuable resource.

• By 2022, 60% of CEOs will be directly involved in productizing data assets to create new revenue streams. (Gartner)
• 78% of businesses say data sharing creates new revenue opportunities. (Forrester)

Pressure to Monetize Data and Share Costs

• 85% of organizations want to monetize their data but struggle with where to start. (EY)
• 62% of companies have no data monetization strategy. (Deloitte)
• Data marketplaces provide a plug-and-play way to sell data.

Demand for Specialized External Data

• 61% of organizations say external third-party data is essential to decision making. (Forbes)
• But acquiring new datasets remains challenging without central marketplaces.

As a result of these trends, data monetization is projected to become a $424 billion industry by 2022 according to the World Economic Forum. Data marketplaces will continue seeing massive growth as sharing data becomes standard practice.

Forecasts predict:

• Data marketplace industry to reach $19 billion by 2026. (Allied Market Research)
• 75% of large enterprises will adopt internal data marketplaces by 2022. (Gartner)
• 90% of organizations actively selling and sharing data by 2025. (Barclays)

Real-World Data Marketplace Use Cases

Data marketplaces are powering data sharing and analytics across diverse domains including:

Customer Intelligence

Retailers combine their own sales data with third-party data on customer demographics and locations to identify market segments with the highest purchase potential.

Fraud Detection

Banks enhance their financial transaction data with external cybersecurity, identity and compliance data to improve fraud monitoring accuracy.

Predictive Maintenance

Manufacturers buy real-time sensor data from equipment makers to detect anomalies and predict maintenance needs before breakdowns occur.

Market Research

Media companies subscribe to data on online browsing behavior, social media trends and search keywords for better audience analysis.

Risk Modeling

Insurers augment their own claims data with geography, weather and public safety incident data to build hyper-accurate risk models.

Data Enrichment

Marketers get access to firmographic intel on their customers from data marketplaces to power segmented account-based strategies.

In one example, Australia‘s ANZ Bank created a data marketplace internally to let employees easily discover and share datasets across departments. This accelerated data analytics projects by over 90% and opened up new cross-team collaboration opportunities.

Top Data Marketplace Platforms

Dozens of data marketplace providers have emerged to meet rising enterprise demand. Here are some of the leading platforms:

When evaluating data marketplace solutions, key considerations include:

• Relevance of available data listings to your business goals
• Licensing models – subscriptions, consumption-based, fixed?
• Data quality assurance processes and SLAs
• Security, compliance and privacy standards
• Discovery tools and data sampling options
• Platform vendor lock-in vs. open standards
• Existing partnership ecosystem and integrations
• Pricing and total cost of ownership models

According to Gartner, partnering with an industry-specific data marketplace operated by a consortium can provide access to more niche, targeted data options. For general business data, leading public cloud data marketplaces offer the widest selection.

Trends and Innovations in Data Marketplaces

Several cutting-edge technologies and business models are evolving data marketplace capabilities:

Blockchain-Based Marketplaces

Blockchain enables decentralized data transactions without intermediaries, where smart contracts automatically control licensing and payments. This preserves privacy while retaining data control.

Data Unions

Data unions aggregate individuals‘ data to gain collective bargaining power to negotiate better value for their info from buyers. Data unions remain compliant under privacy laws.

Data Labeling Services

Leading data marketplaces are offering additional services like data labeling, tagging, and augmentation to increase the value of datasets for buyers.

Pricing Innovations

Granular pricing models are emerging beyond just subscriptions and consumption, similar to real-time pricing seen in spot electricity markets.

Vertical-Focused Marketplaces

Niche marketplaces are launching for verticals like life sciences, utilities, manufacturing where domain-specific data is critical.

Internal-External Data Convergence

Hybrid models are developing where internal data lakes and warehouses intersect with external data marketplaces for a unified data sourcing strategy.

How to Get Started with Data Marketplaces

For both data buyers and sellers, here are best practices to tap into data marketplace potential:

For data buyers:

• Take stock of your analytics and internal data needs – identify gaps that external data could help fill.
• Define problems you need to solve – like improving predictive models or powering specific applications.
• Evaluate leading marketplace options and request demos – focus on data relevance over name recognition.
• Understand licensing models – consumption-based pricing offers more flexibility than fixed subscriptions.
• Start small by purchasing targeted datasets – validate value before expanding data intake.
• Monitor usage and ROI – only renew datasets demonstrating clear impact.

For data sellers:

• Catalog your internal data assets and document key metadata.
• Identify datasets aligned to external buyer needs but not containing confidential data.
• Assess the uniqueness of your data – prioritize assets not easily replicable.
• Clean, organize and validate sample datasets to publish on marketplaces.
• Pick marketplaces frequented by your target customer segments.
• Optimize metadata and keywords to get discovered by buyers.
• Start with lower pricing tiers to establish value before raising prices.
• Track usage metrics and buyer feedback to refine your marketplace strategy.

The Outlook for Data Marketplaces

By 2025 industry forecasts predict:

• 90% of enterprises will have traded data via external marketplaces. (IDC)
• 85% of data monetization will occur via on-demand marketplaces. (Gartner)
• The top 100 data marketplaces will account for 90% of revenues. (Forrester)

Key drivers will be increased comfort with data sharing models, technology advances that simplify data transactions and coming generations seesing data as a commodity to be exchanged.

However, challenges remain around balancing open data access with privacy, security and regulation. Pricing race-to-the-bottom contests as data commoditizes also pressure marketplace business models. Maintaining high-quality, reliable datasets curated by human experts is key to long-term sustainability.

Innovations like decentralized data exchanges, AI analytics built into marketplaces and vertical-specific data pooling will help overcome these barriers. Overall data marketplaces represent an exciting new paradigm for tapping into the ever-expanding universe of data to gain business advantage.