Financial services companies are a relatively good example of an industry focused on generating revenue by leveraging data.
Credit card issuers and retail banks use customer transaction data to improve targeting of cross-sell offers.
Partners are increasingly promoting merchant based reward programs which leverage a bank’s data and provide discounts to customers at the same time.
Once these contributory databases are developed and customers become reliant on their insights, they become extremely valuable and persistent data assets.
These businesses solve vexing problems for large numbers of users, and by their nature capture a broad swath of data from their customers.
As these data sets grow, they become increasingly valuable in enabling companies to better tailor their products and features and to target customers with highly contextual and relevant offers.
Customers don’t sign up to directly benefit from the data asset; the product is so valuable that they simply want the features offered out-of-the-box.
There weren’t network effects, per se, but the sheer scale of the data asset that was created was an essential element of improving the product over time.
"[6]Selvanathan and Zuk[7] offer a framework that includes "monetization methods that are outside the bounds of the traditional value capture systems employed by an enterprise... tuned to match the context and consumption models for the target customer."
Consumers, as well as enterprises who desire to monetize their participation in a data supply chain, may soon be able to access social network enabled Bitcoin exchanges and platforms.