Interesting topic, I did read about something similar before... but I couldn't find the link now...
As far as I remember they calculated $80/per_user last year only in gmail but I believe is debatable because I believe there are implicit and explicit revenue. For example, if you do a google-search about gmail-revenues you will find a lot of people saying that gmail doesn't make money at all..However, they are weighting the whole thing as standalone...and they must consider Google as a whole...not only gmail...because it wouldn't be fair...and in the end is kind simple the idea: whatever the app is drive, gmail, youtube... they are just channels for data-collection in different-forms...you can later crunched/mined/metadata for selling to advertisers... On Tue, 24 Feb 2015, grarpamp wrote: > Many companies do not charge users of their services. > They say things like "It's free and always will be." > > Pick any "free" service... Facebook, Google, Yahoo, Match, Reddit, > the list goes on and on. > > Only the smallest of free services can be supported by someone's > personal funds. So for larger services it's well understood that if > their users aren't paying them, the money must come from somewhere. > > The old model answer of former years was advertising through page > ads, clickstreams, referrals and those sorts of obvious and observable > things. Combined with burning off stock market offerings. > > The new model answer includes all the former ways, plus much deeper > profiling and analysis of users, their pictures, messages, interests, > locations, etc... all done on the secret unobservable corporate > backend, and selling off that metadata to the highest bidders. > > And perhaps more dollars from simply lying, violating their publicly > posted hole ridden privacy policies, and selling directly identifiable > user data as well. Or say taking immunity from prosecution from > having given/sold it away to cozy governments. > > All of which have monetary values associated with them. > > Companies also hide their revenue, costs, and their "active in last > three months" vs "dead user" numbers. > > Some usable public statements and government/market filings are > available. And datacenter and employee costs can be approximated. > > There is current value analysis, such as in selling what's hot by > this months clicks. And future/lifetime value analysis, such as > Target datamining for pregnant women to own. There are also dataset > specific values, such as names and addresses vs political alignments. > > The values could be represented in $dollars per month per user. > > > Anyway, question... > > Anyone have links to studies made within the last five years that > have attempted to calculate the dollar value of datamined users?
