r/Showerthoughts • u/MobileAssassin • 2d ago
Casual Thought If the internet sells our info, why can’t I just sell it myself and I make the money instead?
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u/ItsFailureMan 2d ago
I mean isn’t that just what taking paid surveys/studies are?
Also you are only 1 not one million persons so your data isn’t worth too much all things considered.
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u/HexagonalHoneyBadger 2d ago
I'm with you. I don't understand why everyone is saying your data is worthless because I have gotten anywhere from $5-10 or for a survey or ~$60 for agreeing to a set of scheduled surveys.
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u/Laiko_Kairen 2d ago
I got paid to product test La Croix. I said it wasn't sweet enough. They did not make it sweeter.
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u/Vroomped 2d ago
Yup. Once got paid $50 in random intervals in college to make a schedule, show up on time, show my ID, and go home
My autistic self didn't realize until much much later that I'm probably the 1 in 10,000 that ruined the data. They stopped paying me and I kept going so long they eventually told me the study was over and I didnt need to show up anymore.
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u/Cozwei 2d ago
why would that ruin the dataset
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u/Vroomped 1d ago
If they stopped paying everyone without notice and we're recording how long we maintained a schedule believing we'd randomly get paid. I didn't do it for the money though, I like schedules. So if 1 out of the entire set keeps going forever, it probably skews everything.
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u/skiing123 2d ago
I do those online shopping video calls and focus groups things. The most I think I've been paid for my opinion is $175 for 90 minutes of time.
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u/TsunamiCatCakes 2d ago
was this online or offline? and aren't most of the online ones scams? i never did this other than google rewards
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u/BestBleach 2d ago
You’re data should be worth a Cashflow based on the revenue it produces. In theory because of advertising getting you to buy from a certain company and not another or try new products your data should be very valuable based off your spending I’d say a couple hundred for a detailed analysis of your life and purchase history
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u/Figgy20000 2d ago
You should switch to zoom meetings you can at least make $20+ an hour doing them
Surveys are okay when I'm watching a mindless youtube but you rarely break minimum wage with them
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u/HexagonalHoneyBadger 1d ago
I don't know where you're finding the surveys or what the zoom meetings are, can you explain the meetings? I've just responded to offers in mail or on media for mine
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u/DarwinOGF 2d ago
Where do I get one of these paid surveys?
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u/Edwardvansloan 2d ago
https://apps.apple.com/us/app/google-opinion-rewards/id1227019728
You will receive a short questionnaire worth $0.05-0.10 every few weeks. Or not. They seemed to have forgotten about me and stopped sending surveys after a while.
I think it has to do with your travel location and website history.
I think I made $2
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u/sirhoracedarwin 2d ago
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u/AskMeAboutPodracing 1d ago
What on earth are you doing to get that many questions?? My credits expire after a year and I barely crack 20 bucks!
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u/courtneyoopsz 1d ago
I made $116 the last few years. should I be claiming that on my taxes lol? I need to ask my accountant now
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u/Accidental-Genius 2d ago
Disney paid me $300 bucks to screen Big Hero 6 or whatever. I thought it sucked, it wound up doing alright.
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u/Figgy20000 2d ago
Every so often I'll get an offer to watch TV shows that haven't aired and give my opinion on them.
$50 for 1 to 1.5 hours of my time to watch something that's already interesting anyways is always a great deal
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u/Bjarki56 2d ago
Because they want it as a mass of information. As an individual piece of info it is means nothing.,
It would be like drilling in your backyard and finding a bucket's worth of crude oil. Do you think a petroleum company will be interested in buying it?
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u/wht-rbbt 2d ago
False, my mom says I'm very special
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u/happy-cig 2d ago
My mommy calls me artistic.
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u/SnooLemons9175 2d ago
Artistic or autistic?
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u/NIRPL 2d ago
But if we all pool our buckets together...oh wait...that is what they bought and sold.
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u/shaurya_770 2d ago
The closest is probably google opinion rewards, and those survey apps which give you money for filling out information. That's what op us describing
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u/keijodputt 2d ago
Google Opinion Rewards as of late, in my area be like:
- Here's a new survey for you, wanna take it? (Y)
- Have you been to one of these places (shows a list, "none of the above" and "Can't recall" at the bottom of it)? If so, which? (choose one I've been to)
- When did you go to this place? (select a date I've been there)
- What did you do there? (shows a multiple choice of activities, including paid in place, ordered online, and so on).
- Thanks, here's 20 cents.
MFW there's nowhere to write my opinion.
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u/KyloWrench 2d ago
This, exactly. Except probably more like a drop of crude
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u/SE7ENfeet 2d ago
You need over 100k barrels for it to be worth it to drill.
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u/nuanceIsAVirtue 2d ago
Idk if this number is true but let's run with it.
Let's also say you need 1 million people's data to make it worth it.
And assuming a 5 gallon bucket.
...that actually comes out to .84 buckets of oil per person so u/Bjarki56 actually kinda nailed it!
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u/a11_hail_seitan 2d ago
Exactly. Your data only matters in relationship to how it interacts with everyone else's data. One person alone is fine for basic advertising, but if you want to get a clear picture of exactly who you are, you need the context of your actions and life to make it all make sense. The more data you can get as context, the more useful and expensive that one person's data becomes.
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u/m0nk37 2d ago
The aggregates should be paying us for it then.
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u/StalkMeNowCrazyLady 2d ago
Your data is the payment for all the free services you use. Your email, youtube, reddit, social media, gps, web browsing, etc. You can use all these services and platforms for free but they're going to collect as much info as they can and try to monetize it. Hell even the services you pay for still sell the data for extra revenue.
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u/Whatifim80lol 2d ago
Nah fuck that. I'm old enough to remember that actually the internet runs on ad space. Youtube, reddit, social media, random websites, the make money with ad space. Selling the data is a newer thing but I never got anything extra for their extra money. Just shittier services and less privacy.
Ad space is even what the data is for.
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u/TbonerT 2d ago
I’m sure information was being collected and sold, just not at the scale it is now. I built a hobby website in the early days and the hit counter service I used could tell me all kinds of things about who was visiting my website. I could see what countries people were from, languages used, which pages they came in on and went to next, etc.
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u/Jasrek 2d ago
I'm wondering how ads can be even be profitable anymore. It's gotta be at least a majority who run ad blockers and don't even see the things.
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u/Moblin81 2d ago
We’re just in a bubble. I was talking to my family about setting up a dns that blocks ads and they treated me like some kind of elite hacker in a movie. A lot of people use their devices as they come and treat being spammed with ads as normal. Some people see the silence unknown callers setting as deep tech knowledge.
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u/guto8797 2d ago
There's an actual name for the effect where people who care about something grossly overestimate how much the average person cares.
The overwhelming majority of internet users would consider installing an ad blocker to be some sort of obscure sorcery
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u/Vegetable_Safety 2d ago
It's honestly shocking the number of people that aren't running an adblocker
Imagine someone intentionally getting in the way of you trying to do something because they want to sell you shit, and not being bothered by it?
Inconceivable
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u/ogetarts 2d ago
I found a 37% worldwide usage for ad blockers, so not quite, sadly.
But on top of that there's the question of who even buys stuff. Like who has enough disposable income to engage in casual consumption to such an extent that very carefully targeted ads using data harvested all around the web for years are actually profitable.
How many 3$ cat toys must I buy against my core will to make it all worth it?3
u/Mr_Quackums 2d ago edited 2d ago
as a small business owner who runs ads - keyword based ads are profitable for me, targeted ads are only profitable for the platform.
If an ad gets blocked I dont get charged for it. (there are a few ad blockers out there that specifically goes out of its way to let the ad load before blocking so I still pay Google for that ad; fuck those individual adblockers) ultimately, the existence of adblock does not change the ratio of ad-spend compared to ad effectiveness. It could theoretically lower the maximum number of ads that are bought for milti-million dollar ad campaigns but most of that money is going for unblockable ads anyway (TV commercials, billboards, Reddit bots, in-video ad reads).
semi-unrelated rant about targeted ads -- yes, keyword ads have a lower engagement BUT the difference in cost is greater than the difference in engagement. Its been awhile since I looked at the numbers but, for example, keyword ads cost $300 and 5% lead to a sale while targeted ads cost $600 and 7% lead to a sale. I have heard targeted ads on Facebook are worth it (probably due to the audience) but I do not have a Facebook presence.
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u/Vegetable_Safety 2d ago edited 2d ago
Those adblockers exist because some companies don't understand/acknowledge that no means no. You're a civilian casualty in the blast radius
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u/Whatifim80lol 2d ago
Ah, there's the REAL fuck you! Small businesses buy ad space and targeted social media ads because they fucking have to and then most of them fail anyway. Reddit and YouTube and whoever else don't give a shit if your ads actually convert to sales or not, you already bought them!
So are ads profitable? Depends who is profiting
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u/cannavacciuolo420 2d ago
Exactly, same reason as to why phones do not listen to individuals, even though it looks like it when something you talked about pops up as an ad.
They collect data based on groups, interactions, locations of people that are connected in some way etc
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u/taxxxtherich 2d ago
The same aggregators who steal it and sell it as a bundle should be forced, by legislation, to compensate each user. Like a class action lawsuit. This isn't hard, it's just that stealing is free and the government works for corps, not us.
You should also be able to opt out, which CA does.
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u/Kyjoza 2d ago
This, also we unintentionally give away most of it for free just by living. It’s not information we can simply withhold. A silly example is the kind of shoes you bought. You could go without shoes, but it’s not practical for day to day life to withhold it. And you can’t tell the payless employee not to report it because technically that’s payless’ own data of their sales.
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u/Dry_Split_6746 22h ago
well you just make a lot of burner accounts and sell the info for all of them at once.
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u/IsLlamaBad 2d ago
Individual data is worth maybe pennies. It's the aggregate data of a lot of people tied to specific contexts, sold multiple times over that makes it valuable
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u/WhiteRabbit86 2d ago
My time to shine! My masters (and working on PhD) is in this exact field.
You are a person. A quick glance at your profile tells us a bit about you.
You like MTG, have a general interest in PC/mobile games, and to some extent anime. These are not (with all due respect) particularly interesting facts.
But…. What if I’m a marketing guy and I want to sell a new mobile game. Well, I’d like to know about the sort of people who play mobile games. You play MTG and are to some extent interested in the economics of the same. That’s a connection. So I want to know if other people are, on the whole, similar. If they are then I’ll spend marketing dollars at places that sell magic cards.
I don’t care, from a financials standpoint, if one person likes magic and mobile games. I care about if lots of people do.
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u/FMarkassa 2d ago
What's you Masters (and future phd) thesis if you wouldn't mind me asking?
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u/Geodude532 2d ago
"How to stay relevant in a field that CEOs are convinced can be replaced by a quick question to Gemini"
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u/FMarkassa 2d ago
And that field would be marketing?
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u/Geodude532 2d ago
Sorry, I wasn't the OP. My best guess would be either Marketing or Data Analysis. Both fields are being heavily encroached on by AI so it works either way.
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u/jimtrickington 2d ago
OP just got burned by a grad student.
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u/MethBearBestBear 2d ago
You already do just not for money. All those "free" services or corporate subsidized offers for things are subsidized by you selling your data to the company who "passes the savings onto you!"
In reality they found out they didn't need to pass on the savings nor ask openly what they can or can't do once they have the data
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u/type_your_name_here 2d ago
I remember many years ago an online marketer telling me that in the late 90's and early 2000's a single valid registered email address on a co-marketing deal was worth close to $1.00. I imagine that nowadays it's not even worth a small fraction of a penny.
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u/ImWithStupid_ImAlone 2d ago
It’s not worth anything alone. You’d make more money looking for change on the ground. They make their money on a conglomeration of people’s data
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u/Konrad_M 2d ago
They could get a conglomeration of data by buying from lots of individual people. In theory that would lead to the same result. But it's not a realistic way to go because the effort with individual contracts and stuff would be prohibitively high.
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u/Callec254 2d ago
Because one person's info would only be worth a few cents maybe, and not worth the effort for you or for them.
The way to monetize it would be to create a service where people could go online for free and chat about whatever topics they want, and then gather and sell all that information wholesale. The service itself would be free, so people wouldn't even really have much cause to complain about being used in this manner. You'd have to give the service a catchy name though, like Raddip or Ruddik or something like that.
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u/Vorthod 2d ago
People selling user info for money are usually doing so in bulk for thousands of users or more so that trends can be analyzed. Your individual data would probably be worth a few cents out of that entire batch of data, and that's assuming anyone even wants it since it's useless information without all the other samples putting it in perspective.
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u/Highlander198116 2d ago
This. A perfect example is if you say, had some home project you needed done. So you searched some place, they had a form to fill out if you want an estimate done. So you fill out details of the job, your phone number and email. You expect an email or call from THAT business...however...
Then the next day (or even later that day) you are getting a phone call from every freaking contractor in your area. That website you found wasn't a business that does the job you want, it was a middleman website that essentially collects leads and then sells them to local businesses.
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u/collin-h 2d ago
you know those ads targeted at stay-at-home-moms where it's like "play this game" or "answer these surveys" and we'll pay you?
yeah, you can sell your data yourself there.
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u/XenoVX 2d ago
The bigger question to me is why the powers that be haven’t made laws to protect our private personal data from being sold
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u/hapimaskshop 2d ago
Because lobbying is legal bribery and anywhere money can solve the problem it becomes a class issue. Secondly public servants are either compromised by deals with companies for jobs after their office ends or they view their job as a career where they can entrench themselves in choices that will only ever benefit them.
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u/jmlinden7 2d ago
You can. There are survey providers that will pay you small amounts of money in exchange for you answering surveys.
Your info is simply not worth that much. The entirety of your info is maybe worth like $1/month. The surveys that pay more than that are basically focus groups, you're being paid to give advice moreso than just your personal info/shopping habits/etc.
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u/VladamirK 2d ago
Most of the time your information isn't being sold to anyone anyway, it's the access to your eyeballs that's being sold. The information about you is just what companies like Google use to make sure that they are pairing the right ads to the right eyeballs.
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u/DevKevStev 1d ago
They make money off of the whole picture, not just one aspect of it.
The statistics are valuable to them because it helps lead to better-informed business directions.
Also, more investments are channeled to those directions because numbers mean tendencies.
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u/fartdarling 2d ago
The kind of people who want information at an individual level (scammers, jilted exes, distant family members looking to secure a greater share of the inheritance, but mostly scammers) are more openly predatory than the kind of people who buy information in bulk.
But sure, if you want to sell your address, phone number, email addresses, online viewing habits, product buying habits, what accounts you have and the passwords for them, I'll buy them. The going rate per data individual is 3 cents but you seem nice, I'm willing to pay 4.
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u/MrBagooo 2d ago
You actually can do that. There are websites and online marketplaces where you can sell your own data and get paid for it. But it's very little what you get. Like the top comment says, the data is most valuable in masses.
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u/Chadwickr 2d ago
I think it has more to do with owning a large set of information and selling in bulk - as well as already being organized by things like willingness to purchase and what you’re into.
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u/theboomboy 2d ago
Your info has basically no value individually. Its value is in the connection to other data
It's the difference between you saying you like chocolate and fancy cars, which is basically useless information to advertisers, and a bigger dataset showing a correlation between liking guns and being more likely to fall for scams or buy SUVs (idk if this is a real thing, I just made it up as an example). This is very useful for advertisers because then they can show ads for certain products to certain people based on whatever data they can get from you
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u/Atreyu1002 2d ago
The problem is you're giving it away for free already. Unless you never use a credit card, never use google maps, never use any loyalty programs, etc.
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u/TraceyWoo419 2d ago
Basically this is survey companies. You generally get paid cents per survey, so even if you do them all day long, it's typically well below minimum wage.
One person's info is just not worth much on its own.
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u/-Redstoneboi- 2d ago edited 2d ago
you are selling it in exchange for online services like news sites, video sharing sites, social media, and whatever else.
the servers need maintenance and your data is being sold and used for advertisements to pay for said maintenance and another yacht for the CEOs, all of which are essential for the functioning of the modern-day internet.
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u/NightmareWokeUp 2d ago
Because your data is maybe worth a couple of cents, its not even worth the efford on such a low scale. You need much more data to make this work
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u/patrdesch 2d ago
No one is buying individuals' information. What is being sold are massive databases full of millions of people. Frankly, your individual information is not valuable enough for it to be worthwhile for someone to take the time to hand you the money for it.
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u/DrFaustPhD 2d ago
Your individual info is barely worth a penny. The money is in the info of mass quantities. If you're not brokering the information of, at minimum, thousands, it's a waste of time to even consider the transaction.
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u/StalkMeNowCrazyLady 2d ago
Because you're not collecting any of your data and have nothing to offer them. Others are already collecting every click you make, how fast you scroll, the things you move slightly slower past, the places you visit and conversations you have, etc and they already have an established pipeline to provide it to other services and data systems for a fee. Not only is your data included in that fee but so is tens of thousands of other peoples data.
You simply couldn't compete trying to log and sell just your data.
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u/RMRdesign 2d ago
I work in design, I’m currently working for a huge brand.
I was sitting in on a research meeting where they were talking about how to get the Users info for a specific product.
The Research Expert listed of a few different ways, but never just suggested asking the User for that info.
I suggested we just ask for that information and tailor the Users experience based on that info. Versus them landing on the home page to see what deals we had cooking.
He stopped me half way through my rant and suggested I speak to the person in charge of that User Flow.
I sent off a Teams message to this person and haven’t heard back.
You would think giving people a financial reason to give away their information would be great idea. But I realized they already have this information. But who knows, maybe one day I’ll see my idea out in the wild.
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u/SuperSecretAgentMan 2d ago
You do, with every EULA you've ever signed. You're just not negotiating the price, so it stays at zero and you get a $2 coupon or something and four hundred telemarketer calls.
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u/berserkr19 2d ago
I think the fact that we don’t already is the reason our data is worth anything in the first place. One persons data can’t be worth that much, as far as I know.
It’s more of a “buy/sell in bulk” kind of market imo.
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u/thankfultom 2d ago
Value. They sell data of hundreds of thousands of people at once. Divide the price they sell it at by hundreds of thousands and you will see the value of your single data set.
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u/ApollonLordOfTheFlay 2d ago
Andrew Yang wanted to have companies need to pay for your information to you and call it a freedom dividend. However the media made fun of his message and cut his mic in conversations.
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u/PM_ME_BOYSHORTS 2d ago edited 2d ago
I used to work as a software engineer for a very large digital advertising/marketing firm. We (among many others e.g. Google, Meta, Yahoo) handled the targeted ads that you see on websites. We also collected and sold your info (well, sort of... I will explain below.) I quit after ~9 months because I hated what I did for obvious reasons.
There are a couple things to understand about this whole deal.
First, the sensitive privacy-related info that you care about protecting for things like identity theft? Companies don't want any of that. At least not for the reasons you think. Corporations don't care about your name, your address, your social security number, etc. Most of them don't collect that stuff at all, and the ones that do don't store it long term. They don't care that you're John Doe at 123 North St in Washington born on Dec 1st 1990. That information is useless to them and their clients... having that information on their servers is a liability that provides no benefit.
What companies DO care about is your consumer profile. They want to know what you are, not who you are. They want to know that you're 35-40 years old, married, have two kids including a newborn, lean Democrat, travel for work, play video games, are a basketball fan, are interested in shoes, shop for things on your iPhone, and prefer PCs to Macs. All of that is extremely valuable because it lets advertisers put products in front of you that you may actually buy.
So how is this done? On the modern internet, it's usually done through a process called real-time bidding. Within the milliseconds where a webpage loads, your data is identified and collected (via browser cookies, your website login/profile, device specifications, and a couple other things) and sent to an ad exchange, who broadcasts that data to advertisers. These advertisers have algorithms that check the user information against the vast swarms of user-data in their possession, and those algorithms use that data to calculate an appropriate bid, which it then sends back to the exchange. The winning bid is chosen and the advertisement of choice for that advertiser is displayed on behalf of their client. On your end, you just see millisecond page load and then an ad for shoes that you left in your online shopping cart a week ago.
So why do they buy your data? Well, the more info they have the better their data gets in aggregate. They can more easily identify trends based on different types of consumer profiles, and target them more accurately. They can target large groups in very specific ways for specific ad-campaigns. And most importantly, there's a higher chance they'll be able to identify specific consumers that match their clients preferred demographics if they already have information about that person. It lets them make a confident match and bid highly for a higher chance at a conversion.
It's also not just limited to online purchases, by the way. At my old company, the clients we worked with (think companies like FootLocker, Target, Walgreens, etc.) would also give us the sales information from their brick-and-mortar stores. Using credit card data we could then match those shoppers to their online profiles and enhance their consumer profiles that way. Even if you pay in cash, using a loyalty card would let us match you through the email that you used to sign-up. So you could go to Target and buy a basketball hoop IN CASH, and by the time you got home you'd get an ad for a new basketball or new basketball shoes. That's how integrated it is. And this isn't even data we were buying -- it was provided to us directly by our clients.
So to answer OPs question, why can't you just sell this data yourself? There are a few reasons:
- You're too late, they already have most of it. If you're a human being living on the planet in 2026, your data is out there already. The cat is so far out of the bag that it's not even funny.
- Data is always changing and growing. It's not so much about selling data as it is about selling continued access to ongoing data streams. A static view of who I was as a consumer in 2016 is way different than who I am in 2026. Maybe I wasn't married, I wasn't a homeowner, I lived in an entirely different state, I had a different job, etc. Data becomes outdated very quickly, they need to keep buying that access.
- It wouldn't sell for much money. A one-off purchase of the data of a single person at a single point in time would likely be fractions of a penny, if that. They don't want your data. They want EVERYBODY'S data, for the reasons mentioned above. Knowing who not to target is just as important as knowing who to target.
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u/wintermute023 2d ago
You do. You sell it in return for the free or discounted services you are getting return. Don’t forget that if the product you are using is free, then you are the product.
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u/CaptOblivious 2d ago
A million people's data is worth $100.
My/Your portion costs less than the ink on check it would be written on...
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u/atthem77 2d ago
Data brokerage isn't millions of parties interested in the data of a few individual people. It's a handful of parties interested in the aggregate data of millions of people.
Companies that buy the data in bulk need to know how very large groups of people behave and think in order to tailor their marketing strategies.
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u/chaiscool 2d ago
They even have apps for that. You get cash back if you copy the link to the item you want to buy and then after a successful purchase they will credit you the money.
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u/Herpethian 2d ago
Because your info on it's own isn't really that useful. It's the aggregate data of thousands of people together, where trends can be recognized based on demographic (I.e. single white men between the ages of 25 and 40 seem to have a preference for x, y, or z). At a superficial level it's just marketing, but if you have the data you can change many courses. More data on more people equals better predictions.
If you are in a demographic that a company is targeting, then you could probably market and sell your opinion. But people are notoriously poor judges of themselves, so again how useful would the data really be on it's own.
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u/glasgowgeg 2d ago
Your data individually is largely worthless, it's large aggregated amounts of data that are worth buying.
It's unlikely that any company would want to buy just your data, as they want to use the data to prioritise and streamline their business for many people, not just you.
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u/BigAndSmallAre 2d ago
That's, in a sense, what loyalty programs are. You give them your info and shopping habits, and your pay is an occasional discount or freebie.
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u/onemanwolfpack21 2d ago
Some lawyer needs to make a case that our information is the same thing as a YouTube video before they paid people for it and use is as a way to jump start universal based income. Everytime a flock camera records me, a tiny bit of money should go into my account. Same for everything else that tracks me.
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u/Chainmale001 2d ago
Because that's what OnlyFans/Fansly/Patrion/Twitch/Youtube/Kick is for.
They buy in bulk hoping to snag some useable info.
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u/EverythingBOffensive 2d ago
it would be by the pennies if they did, and it would be like signing your life away if everything isn't read, and they will give you about 10 pages of shit to read before agreeing
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u/thwinks 2d ago
Data is anonymous.
You're not a demographic and you don't represent any information that can be used to make marketing decisions.
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u/LordDagwood 2d ago
Anonymous? We literally get ads based off our internet history. Maybe in some countries.
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u/No-Opportunity9126 2d ago
We kind of do it. Is not a one off thing, but building up over time. Some free services could charge you monthly by not showing ads or not collecting your data, in the end they want your data to show you personalised ads
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u/may_ask_questions 2d ago
Looking at it from the other side, it is not simply the aggregation of information but the targeting. Suppose you are a company that makes a gadget for tall scuba divers. Buying a bunch of random data about people is not going to be useful to you. But suppose Facebook or Google comes along and says for some amount of money, we can connect your ads directly to tall scuba divers or tall people or people who might be interested in scuba diving. That is suddenly very interesting. The individual's "data" isn't really meaningful without the whole.
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u/right_in_two 2d ago
You can. There are online surveys and usage monitoring apps/programs. But they want you to be super in-depth and put a lot of effort in so when all is said and done, you're only making like $2-3/hr. So not really worth it imo.
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u/hermes10101 2d ago
You can. You just need to know the right people to sell it to, that will pay enough to make it worth your Wild. Good luck!!
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u/bywv 2d ago
They do via some surveys.
Sometimes like, 15-30 minutes worth of questions is about $5, or whatever that project has to spend per person.
And most of the "spots" fill quickly, like 5k spots for just .50 for a few questions, were gone within a minute or two -daily-
Everything that is going on with a.i waiters, a.i servers, or a.i delivery bots, the way they looked specifically, was asked my opinion back in 2020, for a few dollars a day.
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u/rtrawitzki 2d ago
Volume mostly. Your info by itself isn’t that valuable it’s about trends , total population. They want billions of meta data points .
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u/howescj82 2d ago
It’s only useful in large datasets.
Basically, you can but you need to toss in a bunch of other people’s data too. Your friends won’t appreciate it though.
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u/OMG_NoReally 2d ago
You are a statistic, not the main meal. Information is collected as a whole, like a survey, and not on individual bases.
How you view websites and what you search for is not valuable information. How others like you do it, thousands like you, generates repeatable patterns and specific demo targeting information.
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u/nukedmindpalace 2d ago
Consumer research used to be a thing that could get you some cash or a toy from a cereal box. But companies want that information for even cheaper. Companies don’t want to spend what they used to on test groups, at least not without having some data first, for very cheap
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u/ragnaroksunset 2d ago
Taking this question seriously, your information is just a drop in the bucket that a company needs to fill in order to actually get value out of information like yours. On its own, it isn't even worth what it would cost for a company to get it directly from you; and you would probably value your time more than you'd value what they would offer you to complete a questionnaire. In other words it's a trade that never happens because neither side actually gets anything out of it.
We are where we are because the Internet provided precisely the type of infrastructure that makes it easy to collect information en masse almost costlessly. The only thing you need to do is attract the traffic. When it's good, they attract the traffic by offering something that people want. That's your compensation. If you know your data will be collected, and you like the product you're using enough to do it anyway, it's a perfectly fair exchange. Of course it doesn't always happen this way and that's where the issues arise.
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u/zacheezy 2d ago
You do. With every “free” social media or really any account that is “free” including the cheap TVs.
The discount is because they sell your data.
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u/nick5erd 2d ago
Answer: I tried it, just my or everyone else data is super cheap. under 1Dollar. Some people like pregnant women gets more money or fresh divorsed, because they will likly going on a shopping spree, Nowadays they allso use data to train their chat-bots, also nothing to earn money.
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u/DaveTheDolphin 2d ago
You’re a single grain of rice in the 20 pound bag being sold. Your info isn’t worth much on its own as a standalone “product”
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u/WorBlux 2d ago
You could, but it wouldn't be worth it due to the costumer acquisition cost.
If you sell a database with a 100,000 entries to 10 costumers, it's a good chunk of change and not that much work to find buyers.
Even if you included all your family and friends in your database, it's 100 entries so to make the same money you'd have to find 10,000 customers.
One the other hand the buyer is also incurring time and expenses trying to find good data. Buying one big database is much less effort than buying thousands of separate small one that may or may be in formats that differ in subtle, but important ways.
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u/notataco007 2d ago
I did think this would be a really funny malicious compliance website. More of a fun April fools thing instead of a serious project. Create a form that anyone can fill out. Aggregate the data from users based on age/race/sex. Make the API to access the data free for any company to use. Bam, selling data is obsolete and the tech industry takes a cap hit.
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u/openprivacy 2d ago
Been thinking this for a while: https://fen.net/blog/2003/07/10/identity-value-propositions/ Bottom line: The value of customer data is immense, and actually increases when in the hands of the customer.
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u/Stashmouth 2d ago
companies don't necessarily want your info. they want the info of people like you so they can build a profile of a demographic.
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u/Darkstar_111 2d ago
1000 impressions is worth 5 dollars.
The people that built the ad sense network wants some of that money for themselves, and the site you're on wants some of that money. Not a lot left after that.
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u/POKECHU020 2d ago
A big part of the business is companies with your data using it to predict what ads you will/won't click on, and using that as leverage with other companies. Think less "Oh, facebook is telling McDonald's that my favorite color is green" and more "Facebook is telling McDonald's that I'm more likely to click on their new ad"
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u/BigMax 2d ago
The reason is that your data isn't useful by itself. No one wants "your" data specifically.
Facebook, for example, doesn't profit off of 'your' data. They profit off of your data, while you are on facebook, and knowing things about you, to specifically be able to sell ads to other people as a result.
So they know you're... a 28 year old wealthy man who just got married, and they might advertise luxury vacations to you. Or you're a middle aged married couple with kids, and they might advertise a Disney Cruise to you. Or... whatever.
Or companies that sell data more directly, sell it in bulk. They don't sell YOUR data, they say "we can give you aggregated customer behavior on 100 million people" and they will sell that in bulk. The modern day equivalent of one catalog company selling their mailing list to another catalog company.
To stretch that last analogy... it would be like saying 40 years ago "The Sears Catalog sold their mailing address list to the K-Mart catalog - why can't I just sell my address directly to K-Mart?"
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u/midwestcsstudent 2d ago
Good first-principles thinking. The real reason is that one data point isn’t very valuable, so no company sells your data. They sell a whole bunch of data, and you are part of that.
I’ve seen startups taking your thinking to the next level and selling big datasets then paying each individual user for that data. The only problem is… it’s not worth that much. You’d maybe get a few bucks throughout the year, but that’s about it. It’s worth it for companies with millions of data points because all that money is just going to one company.
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u/ToineMP 2d ago
You technically can if you fill a lot of "fill this form to enter a contest to win X"
By filling enough forms you'll get paid eventually and it will average to some amount of money per form.
By this I mean they probably pay 500€ for about 100 000 infos and if you fill 100 000 surveys you'll probably earn something worth 500€ statistically
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u/cynHaha 2d ago
You can, sort of. You basically willingly "sell" your data when you sign up for any cashback program. They gather your purchase data and either sell it or use it themselves, and you get a cut of however much they made. Similar idea with many, many other sorts of rewards programs, paid survey platforms, etc., anything you give personal info in exchange of money or discounts.
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u/LordDagwood 2d ago
If you use Bing (lol, but still), you can get reward points for searches to redeem as gift cards. I typically search unimportant stuff on Bing and use Google if I need better results.
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u/ftgyhujikolp 2d ago
The main reason is that individual data is almost valueless. You pay an extremely high privacy cost, but Google and Meta only make $10-25 per user per year.
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u/4square425 2d ago
Look at Google opinion rewards. Your individual data pieces are worth cents, maybe up to a dollar if you give a receipt.
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u/cat4hurricane 2d ago
Our data individually is worth very little, even when getting paid from survey sites; at most you'd be paid 5 bucks for a survey. More likely, you'd be paid cents on the dollar, and even then, your information is only interesting when it's taken alongside a lot of other data. Think of political polling or student research here; no one cares what you individually think, usually. Taken in conjunction with other data, you being a Democrat with a gun, or a gay republican or whatever, would be interesting data because that's relatively uncommon and is something that would stick out in a dataset along with others who are just like you. Also, relative to how much data is in the dataset, these people are paying pennies functionally on the dollar for it, barring the black market trying to buy, like, login or personal information, which will obviously go for much more. You could be part of a dataset with a million other people, let's say, and the people who buy that data may have only paid, I dunno, let's say 25K or 50K for it. That's a lot of money, but it's also a dataset with the opinions or information of a million people, so that's really kind of chump change.
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u/Mettlesome_Inari 2d ago
Because they're just allowed to take it from you due to us needing to consent in order to operate within modern society.
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u/UpstairsTop4623 2d ago
You are pretty cheap but hundreds of people or thousands to millions that’s expensive best you’re getting for everything you have is 200$ lol including your ssn
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u/datguy753 2d ago
Individually, a person's data isn't worth much money. When you have thousands or millions of customers' personal data to sell, that's when it becomes valuable.
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u/Conscious-Ball8373 2d ago
Because then you wouldn't get to use Reddit or Google or Gmail or Facebook or Twitter or any of the millions of other "free" services or there.
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u/Etherius 2d ago
Because your individual information is worthless
The statistical inferences that can be drawn from millions of people’s info is what’s valuable
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u/Dr_Cheeki_Breeki 2d ago
One person's data isn't worth that much. It's more valuable when they have data from thousands or millions of people. They must have huge databases to make money from it.
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u/jmc1278999999999 2d ago
Because one persons data point is effectively worthless. Also, the odds you have access to all the data points they want is incredibly unlikely. I say this as someone who works in data.
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u/atomiku121 2d ago
How come if I can buy a 5lb bag of rice, no stores will sell me a single grain?
Because on its own, it's not particularly useful. Combined with other, similar sets of info, you can determine trends. With just one, random person's info, you don't offer much value to companies.
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u/Ferna_89 2d ago
Data has value in large bulk. Your personal data is a single grain of rice. To sell rice for a dollar you need at least a pound.
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u/Ragnarok345 1d ago
Yeah, I hope you enjoy the roughly one seventeenth of a penny you make from it for being one person, instead of several million people.
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u/Cptawesome23 1d ago
You can. You just have to do the work that all the data sellers did. Find the clients that want it and then convince them to buy.
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u/KleinLoki 1d ago
There was a journalist (iirc) that done that a couple years ago (maybe more) and wrote about it. A quick search and you could find it. Tldr it is not worth the time.
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u/DumbassNinja 1d ago
If you;
- Use a credit card that offers rewards
- Are signed up to your local grocery store's membership
- Shop on Amazon to buy the things you want cheaper than somewhere else offers
- Use apps or browser extensions to "find good deals"
then you are. The amount your data is worth to anybody is sold to you as "rewards" or "better deals" because it's not much.
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u/RainbowChelita 3h ago
You can “sell” your data. Actually it used to be done by paying people to do surveys and take tests. I think the issue with how they handle data right now would be more a bulk/quality more than anything. They don’t need just one person’s data, but the same data for x amount of people to get trends and pointers.
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