A data seller is a company selling data assets on a data marketplace or other data monetization platform. Most often, data sellers are exclusively B2B companies, although some data sellers will also sell on a B2C basis, such as to individual students or researchers.
As a term ‘data seller’ is often used interchangeably with ‘data vendor’. When discussing ‘data commerce’, both terms are more accurate than ‘data provider’, which doesn’t make it explicit that the data is being provided for a price, not for free. Also largely synonymous with ‘data seller’ is ‘data-as-a-service’ (DaaS) company’, which is a company whose primary business model is selling data.
Some data sellers are international companies who are established DaaS industry players. Others are one-man-shows or small businesses which are monetizing internal data assets as a source of net-new revenue.
Data sellers are responsible for creating data products, developing a data pricing strategy, and delivering the data to the client. Data sellers typically offer a range of pricing models and delivery formats, including subscriptions to API or one-off instant downloads into an S3 bucket. Decisions around marketing products, delivery, and pricing are entirely at the data seller’s discretions, not the data commerce platform hosting the business.
