Data Marketing

There are loads of websites out there selling data. Whether you want real estate agents, or small businesses, or email addresses of naïve people who never noticed that little checkbox stating that they would be receiving emails from third party vendors; it’s all out there for sale.

How do they collect this data? A lot of companies take the easy route, they buy it from another data company. First hand data is mostly collected at the bottom of the chain. The most common way is to own or operate a website that requires sign up before you receive further service or information. You sign up by submitting personal information such as your name, email address etc, and you become a fresh record in their database, worth money. I have to mention here, not all websites that require signup sell your information. But those that do, have it stated (sometimes not so clearly) on their websites.

Unfortunately, a lot of data collected thus, is dirty. And few data companies actually care to clean it up. You can get a zip code in the city field, and you shouldn’t be surprised. The contact phone number may only be 7 digits. A big percentage of the data is fake.

Of course, it goes without saying, clean data is worth more than dirty data. Something that will fit beautifully in your RDBMS setting, is even better.