Transform Your Data into Revenue: A Step-by-Step Guide with mytiki
Monetize your userbase. Productize your data. Without any of the legal or organizational hassle.
Navigating the data monetization maze in today's world, with its maze of privacy laws and growing public skepticism, feels a bit like tightrope walking in a hurricane. The stakes? High. The potential for backlash? Even higher. Slip up with unethical data practices, and you're not just losing users; you're the talk of the town for all the wrong reasons. Let’s be real: nobody wants to be that pariah, not even for a single news cycle.
Major bummer. Especially considering everyone knows there's gold in them hills of data. Yet, the path to unlocking its value often feels cluttered with hurdles—ethical considerations, legal hoops, the technical gymnastics of safely packaging and scaling data, and the dance of finding and wooing those elusive data buyers.
But what if I told you there's a way to sidestep this complex dance? That turning your data into a lucrative asset could be straightforward, even straightforward enough for our oft-underestimated caveman ancestors to master? Welcome to the prehistoric revolution made modern with mytiki, where we've harnessed the simplicity of the stone wheel and applied it to the complexity of data monetization.
We’ve meticulously pieced together a process that not only respects the letter and spirit of those pesky privacy laws but also treats your users' data with the reverence it deserves. From securing rock-solid consent to tapping into the untapped potential of SKU-level transactional insights, all the way to ethically cleaning and pooling data for the market, we've got it down to a science.
So, how do we turn this vision into reality? Here’s a no-nonsense (well maybe a little nonsense) walkthrough:
1. Identify Eligible Data
Step one is simple. Which data do you already have that is eligible to be monetized?
When it comes to customer data, this requires explicit consent for their data to be used or shared. This stuff is usually written into your existing privacy policies and terms of service agreements. If you’ve already got permission for it, then you’re in a good spot.
2. Pinpoint Desired Data
What about the data you don’t have explicit consent to use, share or monetize? Before you can monetize it, the first step is to figure out which data you’d want. At mytiki, our current specialization lies in transaction data from credit/debit cards or receipts and demographic data, but it is not limited to this. It could be anything: usage data, location data, operational data and more.
We specialize in transaction and demographic data because to date they are the types of data that are most coveted by data buyers for use cases such as AI model training, quantitative trading, and marketing measurement.
3. Acquire with Consent
This is where the mytiki wizardry really comes into play. The major roadblock when it comes to user data monetization is a logical and necessary one: user consent.
Users need to give you permission to use personal data, and for them to want to do something like that, they have to believe they are getting something in return. Some users will consent to simple things such as their usage data being collected and used if it means internal improvements to the product they are using.
But what about data such as transactional data? The key to acquiring data like this is giving a user something in return that they consider valuable. The most obvious example is money, but other examples include subscription tier upgrades, access to exclusive content or features, in-app currency or items, discounts, and coupons, etc. It can be anything, but it needs to incentivize users to part ways with their valuable data.
Rewards That Make Sense
We’ve built powerful technology that allows users to claim and prove ownership of their data, and in turn license their data to businesses, like how musicians license their songs.
This technology is built into our rewarded programs, which are easily dropped into existing applications or websites.
The above graphic showcases screens from our Managed Rewards SDK, Cashback Connections. On the left screen, you see the offer screen. This presents a user with the chosen method of compensation, in this case being cashback.
Rewarded programs are a great way to obtain consent from users all while rewarding them for their contributions. Since you know your users best, it’s easy to give them a reward that they actually want. For the least amount of sweat on your end, mytiki manages your reward program, but for the daring, feel free to get working on a custom program.
Currently we use a blend of card-linked offers (CLOs) and data sales to compensate users, creating a unique rewards program that has the potential to pay out higher than average CLO programs all while enabling users to shop as usual without the need for manual offer activation.
The User Data Licensing Agreement
Prior to data becoming licensable, a user needs to agree to a User Data Licensing Agreement (UDLA) which is presented within the user journey of the SDK.
The UDLA describes the terms of the program, i.e. what data is collected, what it is used for and for how long, who can use or access it, and what the user gets in return. This simple agreement is pivotal to compliance, as it turns data into true zero-party data (data legally owned by a user and willingly licensed to a business). This is built directly into the managed rewards program flow but can be deployed separately for custom programs.
We try to make this agreement as simple and user-friendly as possible. Key tenets to data privacy regulations include lawfulness, fairness, transparency, accuracy, purpose limitation, and data minimization in GDPR and the right to know what data is being collected, whether it is being sold and to whom, the right to delete said data, and the right to opt-out of the sale of their personal information in CCPA.
All of this and more is covered in the UDLA. It is legally binding, immutable, and digitally signed by both the user and business.
Valuable Rare Data Capture
Okay, so users have agreed to let you license data, but how is it captured? If you have access to transaction data, it’s often just merchant level stuff. Meaning it’ll tell you where someone shopped and how much they spent, but it won’t delve into the specificities of the purchase: SKU-level data.
We’ve built in simple, intuitive and fully-compliant tech that extracts SKU-level data from physical and email receipts. Whether it’s a paper trail or an inbox full, we turn those slips and email confirmations into actionable, valuable data.
4. Publishing with Precision: Choosing Your Path
Let's dive into how you get your data from point A to point mytiki, all ready for showtime. Rule number one: a valid license agreement is your entry ticket. No agreement, no go. This is how we keep everything above board and profitable.
Pick Your Publishing Path
Client Library: Our top pick for most. It’s sleek, integrating the user data licensing agreement right with the data upload process. It’s about efficiency and simplicity, making sure your data is good to go from the get-go.
Backend Server-to-Server Integration: For those who like to keep things backstage, this method's your jam. Directly push data from your servers to ours. Just remember, the data you send needs to be legit, licensed either through your own process or ours.
Why This Is the Game Changer
Here’s where it gets real. Joining the mytiki network means your data is amplified by being joined with other data from businesses using mytiki. By pooling it with others', we create something much bigger and more valuable—a data pool creates value bigger than the sum of its parts. And before it hits the stage, we make sure it's cleaned and polished—stripping away personal identifiers, ensuring it’s not just compliant, but also primed for maximum impact and value. It's not just about gathering data; it's about refining it into a premium, market-ready product.
Rinse and Repeat
This isn’t a one-hit wonder (sorry, Lou Bega!). The more data you provide, the more value we create together. Our promise is to keep the data clean, compliant, and ready for monetization, month after month.
5. Generate Revenue!
Sit back and let the dollars roll in. Our agreements vary, but generally mytiki takes a 30% commission, and the remaining 70% is yours to split up between your business and your users. Keep in mind, you’re beholden to the terms of the UDLA, so keep that in mind when running numbers, especially if you’re utilizing a mytiki managed rewards program.
As previously mentioned, your provided data has increased value as it is merged with data from all of our providers to create unique datasets that businesses desire. As of the date of this publication, the mytiki provider network consists of over 5 million users, 7 billion transactions, and 4 trillion in observed spend. Nice!
Payouts occur monthly. And just like that, voila, a monthly recurring revenue stream. Your data has become a product, and you haven’t even broken a sweat (hopefully).
Conclusion
And that’s that! We take care of all of the heavy lifting, from ensuring data is collected, hosted, and transacted in a fully compliant way to cleaning and pooling data, to creating and maintaining relationships with our network of interested data buyers.
If you’re interested in learning more about how you can turn your data into a monetizable product, go ahead and drop me a line. Yes, actually me.
LOVE this article. This is the future of data we DESERVE!