What adnets out there are paying for data right now?

I agree that, for a publisher, understanding audience is absolutely key. It's troublesome that so many middlemen have, arguably, done a better job of that these last 5-10 years than many publishers. I wonder, though: what's the point of understanding an audience if you don't own and control it? As I'm suggesting in related postings, I think Job 1 for publishers is to own their audiences before somebody else gets them for free. Understanding that you had 4M users with income > $500K after someone else skims them might satisfy curiosity, but it won't improve your bottom line.

1. yield management may be leading us the wrong way. in traditional media, scarcity created the value (i.e. rate card rates as hurdles and limited ad spots). in online our abundance of inventory has taken scarcity away. each publisher's job is to define what his "premium" offering is and sell that without the use of any 3rd parties to maximise its value.
2. the packaging of segments is a critical tool for publishers, and so data is a critical issue, but to make the cost of sale reasonable, you need automation. a SSP would be a great thing (rather than an exchange). (as an aside, arent exchanegs traditionally managed on scarcity? i.e. very few companies with lots of repoting overheads mean that there are a limited number of places to invest your money thus share prices increase?) i completely get that in the future publishers will be selling segments of their audience at a higher yield per audience member than general audience. the question of how do we get there is still unanswered

Not going to shill; but if publishers are not working with adnets that actually pay for the use of data - it's time to start asking questions.

My company (Brilig) is an advertising data marketplace that exists to enable publishers to directly control and monetize audience data (i.e. attributes and segments). My partner, the inventor of Brilig, Christopher Keith, was CTO of the NYSE for more than a decade. He foresaw that a transparent marketplace for data and the prediction of consumer attention and interest was inevitable so we built one. By transparent we mean that all parties (publisher, marketers and eventually even consumers) have full visibility and control of their data assets. Our unique approach is not to "give" data to buyers but rather to allow the buyers to ask (targeting) questions of complex sets of data (which are completely controlled by the pub/seller) thus preventing leakage. This approach enables all parties to maximize liquidity and profitability in a large dynamic market. I'd like to talk to you more about this if you are interested. I think we can help you with your study of the new economics of digital media. You can reach me at pcimino@brilig.com.

Content owners and creators originally sacrificed their audience value in exchange for traffic, an early ad metric. They commoditized their user data, giving it to third party networks, without extracting its true value. This drove down ad revenue as audience data was utilized and monetized on myriads of additional sites rather than the original content owners'.

Many sites are now backpedaling, erecting pay-walls in order to recognize higher revenue, but it is unreasonable to expect a user such as myself to pay for a multitude of subscriptions.

A compromise must be met.

Three parties each have a need; users demand content, creators demand payment, marketers demand audience. I believe that markets can help by efficiently negotiating that compromise.

Tom is correct. Publishers of all types have leaked massive amounts of money. It has always dumbfounded me that within the Internet (and mobile) era of ultra-addressability, digital ad revenue has continually traded at a discount. Perhaps with the creation of a “sell-side” platform, one that can extract the full value of an audience, publishers can plug the leak.

Jeff
Gulp Media