this is wrong, and sloppy thinking to say so.. sloppy people busy talking fast do not have data, but that does not at all equate to "no one has data"
In fact, this is almost tautologically true. If you have:
-- good data
-- on large enough scale
you are not going to sell it. You going to take advertiser dollars and match their ads against right audience, while safeguarding this data as your main know-how. Go and buy "barbell training fans in FL, US" and "women interested in fashion in CA, US" from facebook. Sorry, not for sale.
If instead you decide to "sell the data" it means that you can't really make it work for advertisers. Or, in other words, said data is mostly useless.
I don't know why someone would posit this falsehood.
You are going to sell it to EVERYONE you can (legally and sometimes not). There is no ad-tech company that does not take this stance. You get information about Honda buyers, you're going to sell it to Ford, then take what you sold to Ford (exclusively) and sell a repackaged format of the data (summary) you sold to Ford and sell that to Subaru ALONG with the data Ford asked for in the future.
Data management platforms (DMPs) are an entire concept built around selling the data. Every adtech company (that has any tech) sells the data that is collected, outside of using it for internal targeting. The number of demand partners and amount of useful targeting data to leverage for them, is necessarily a smaller set than what you collect.
Edit: This is experience from multiple senior ad-tech positions.
lol
>You are going to sell it to EVERYONE.
Exactly. And you know what you end up with? I checked lingerie website yesterday to buy a present for my girlfriend, this data was sold, now I'm a women in some DMP. I've bought a bottle of Talisker, now i'm wealthy man in the same DMP (even if I can only afford Talisker one time per year!!!). I've also bought some drugs for my grandfather, and now i'm +70 audience and I'm getting "senior discounts" ads while not being even 35 years old.
This is the problem with data platforms. Take data from everyone, mix it, and you have /dev/random. It's totally fine to milk advertisers for their money (which original article is all about), and not fine for anything else.
Advertisers finally start to understand it. And this is why GOOG and FB are getting all the money and ad-tech is slowly dying.
EDIT: And since -- as you correctly noted -- everyone is incentivised to sell ALL data to EVERYONE -- this is how you end up with a pool full of piss instead of water. Because everyone sold everything to this pool.
In practice, the level and quality could vary significantly, and the difficulty to normalize the feeds could be much harder in practice. If you get data in aggregate from Foursquare and Yelp, potentially it can tell you enough to gauge foot traffic in restaurants, but to your point, it probably can't be used to build an advertising platform.