Data You Can Purchase

Often times you wont have the ability to collect certain data yourself. So you can purchase it from others. There are major markets that sell data on almost everything. If you can think of it someone has most likely collected data on it.

Free Data Options

But before you spend money on it. Make sure that there isn't data that is free already. Researchers open source much of their data, especially if its from publically funded projects. Government data is almost always free aswell. The government has a data portal at data.gov that contains hudnreds of thosuands of datasets that can be used for free. The government collects data in most of its different departments so there it ranges from forestry data, census data, military contract data. There is a lot of different data you don't need to pay for.

Paid Data

Data can be purchashed aswell. There are many different data broker services where you can search for the type of data you want and filter it by industry and other characteristics. Companies like brightdata, AWS Data Exchange, and Snowflake Marketplace offer public marketplaces where pepole can buy and sell data.

1. Timber Company (Forestry/Tree Management)

The timber companies have been noticing some disease in certain tracts of land. Each year a new amount of trees gets infected with this disease. If they remove these trees it helps stop the spread of the disease. They have been sending foresters out to look at their tracts but there is just to much land to cover all of it. They noticed though that when the trees die the leaves stand ut greatly from the surroundings. They figured out that sattlite imagery showed this very well. the most up to date public sattelite photos were quite old. So they reached out to a company which sells this data. They can get weekly sattelite images of all of their tracts of land and intead of having surveyors manually walk each parcel the images give a good enough view of which trees are infected. They save time and get better results using this purchased data.

A Vacationers Hotel

The hotel owner has had business going good but has been having trouble with pricing. Sometimes he lowers his prices and his bookings increase a lot, so he raised them and then the bookings fell a bit. Its hard to figure out the right price because some weekends are holidays or school breaks or sports events and concerts are in the area so its hard to keep track of. There's a lot of different hotels in the area all changing prices though, so if he knew what they all charged that would help him be able to price his own hotel. He reached out to a firm and saw that they sell the data for all the hotels prices for each day for the past 5 years. He purchased this and now is able to get a better picture of how to price his hotel, by averaging the prices of hotels that are simlar to his he can get a good rate without it being so random.

Insurance Company

An insurance company has been getting a lot of refferals but they want to reach more people. They know that when people move to the area they are often likely to switch to a local insurance. They have a hard time knowing who is moving to the area though. They find a data broker selling this information and each month updates a list with the names, address and phone number of people new to the area. The insurance company uses this data to send flyers to the newly moved people, and then call them to introduce themselves and ask about their insurance.

Creative Studio

A creative studio is focused on shows and games about dogs. They create lots of different content about all differnet types of dog breeds. They often have to look up different information about the breeds and find reference images, it takes a lot of time. A data firm reaches out to them and offers to sell a dataset that contains the height, weight, hairtypes, colors, of each type of dog breed, along with 100 quailty references images for each one. They purchase this data and now instead of having to search data each time they want to model a new breed they can just find it in the database. Also every so often new differnet dog breeds start trending on social media. They currently have an employee that tries to follow a lot of dog accounts and keep up with it, but it's hard to know what is actually trending as the algorithm is so random. Instead of manually looking for it they see that they can track search volume and post volume for each dog breed. They purchase access to the search and post volume of each dog breed each month. Now they can compare one month to the next to see if one breed has a spike in populatrity meaning they should make some content on this breed.

Power Company

The power company has sent out flyers to ask people about electric car usage but they get around a 5% repsonse rate. They have had some success with it but there is not quite enough data to get a clear picture. They reach out to a databroker who has information about electric car purchasing and solar adoption segmented by each neighborhood in all of the US. By viewing this data they construct a more clear picture about how much more or less energy usage will occur in the coming months.

Mining Company

A mining company has been doing surveys across many different parcels they are interested in. It has worked but it is a bit slow and expensive to send out surveyers to each parcel. They know that many of these parcels have been surveyed before though. So they look through the governmetn records and find that there are many old land survey records. By putting these together and using modern alogrithms they can create much better estimations ahead of time about which parcels are worth sending a surveyor to.