Data monetization strategy

Researchers at MIT's Center for Information Systems Research, led by Barbara Wixom, have studied data monetization for over a decade. Their 2023 book with Cynthia Beath and Leslie Owens, Data Is Everybody's Business, sorts the options into three approaches. Improving uses data to make work faster and cheaper.

Wrapping and selling

Wrapping uses data to make existing products more appealing, such as recommendations or delivery estimates. Selling offers information to others, and the authors stress that this means solving problems with insights, not only shipping raw files.

Where this site fits

This site is mostly about the third approach, and specifically about licensing data to outside buyers through a broker. But a strategy that jumps to selling without considering the other two often leaves value behind, so this guide covers all three.

1. 1

   Inventory what you hold

   List the datasets, codebases and archives the company has, who owns each, where it lives and how it was collected. Most companies find assets they had forgotten, especially from retired products.

2. 2

   Check the rights before the ideas

   For each item, note what customer terms, privacy notices, partner contracts and open-source licences allow. Anything you can't license externally is limited to the internal options.

3. 3

   Pick one internal use with a measurable result

   Choose a process the data can improve and agree how you'll know it worked. If a promised saving never changes a budget, the MIT researchers would say the data wasn't monetized.

4. 4

   Test external demand quietly

   Name buyers who could use the data and why. Talk to a few under NDA, or ask a broker to, before investing in packaging. Demand you can name beats demand you assume.

5. 5

   Choose the delivery shape

   Decide between a one-off licence, a subscription feed or an insight product. Each has different costs: a feed needs upkeep, a product needs a team, a one-off licence needs only a clean handover.

6. 6

   Set governance and review dates

   Assign an owner, record which buyers have which rights, and review the strategy at least yearly. Laws on personal data and data sharing change often.

• The data is something buyers can't easily collect themselves: private code history, internal records, specialist recordings.
• You can show the rights to license it, and personal data is absent or removable.
• Licensing it doesn't hand a competitor an edge you rely on, or the buyer's field of use can be limited to avoid that.
• The company lacks the people or appetite to build a data product, so a licence is the simplest route.
• The asset is dormant: a shut-down product, a pivot or a wind-down where the data has no internal use left.

In those cases a broker can help: finding buyers, valuing the data, running the paperwork and keeping the seller's time cost low. DataBroker's course and app are built for that path, not for building internal analytics or insight products.

In the EU, the Data Act has applied since 12 September 2025 and changes who may access and share data from connected products. If you sell into Europe or hold such data, take legal advice on how it affects your options.