| No, because people generally vastly over-estimate the value of data to advertisers. Google and Facebook make lots of money because they have near duopoly on online advertising. They make money by taking a cut of ad impression. Data helps in extracting as much value out of an ad impression by more precise targetting but it's not what makes that business work. If Facebook or Google gave all that targeting data to me or their advertising clients, that would result in $0 profit and therefore it has $0 value. Ad network is the business and tracking and demographic data helps to run that business. Without ad network, all that data is worthless. As a corollary, Facebook can over-pay a subset of their users to get strategic data. Even if they loose money it makes sense as a sort of insurance (e.g. if VPN data was deciding factor to them purchasing Instagram, it more than paid off for the life time of company). But you can't sell such data at a price that would make it possible to buy it from people. Not to mention that your company would be completely villified possibly to the point of attracting attention of Congress. |