What Your Personal Data Is Worth To Advertisers

The personal information of web users is worth a lot to advertisers--but when it comes to calculating just how much, the figures may surprise you.

Single pieces of data for individuals is worth pennies, according to Forbes. For example, knowing your marital status is worth a penny, while knowing your occupation is worth two cents.

The information comes from online tracking company Rapleaf, which collects real names and email addresses alongside other kinds of personal information. The company gathers data through "tapping voter-registration files, shopping histories, social-networking activities and real estate records, among other things," according to the Wall Street Journal.

Though the online advertising industry hit $26 billion in 2010, the Rapleaf sheet shows that as a series of characteristics, one person alone can be worth little. Age, gender and location are listed as "free."

Of course, all these pennies add up. Each profile, composed of pieces of information each worth pennies, can end up costing a pretty penny for advertisers and companies like Rapleaf stand to make millions off of the information they compile.

View the entire list below:

Data Pricing From Rapleaf

Comments

[kelleyajones]

09:22 AM on 05/18/2011

Advertising $$. Selling any personal data must require tactic approval and so far I haven't given or sold my permission.

[american-dolt]

02:03 PM on 05/16/2011

How can anyone use you as a commodity w/o your say so?

[Andy Scatterbrain]

02:17 PM on 05/16/2011

That's a good question. I mean if you let people have all their own tracking data and gave them the option of when to share it, the absurdity of the whole thing would be laid bare. Can you imagine walking into Wal-mart and then saying "I don't know what I want to buy. Figure it out for me using my data" and then handing your phone to a robot to make suggestions? But that's precisely why people should own their own data, as intellectual property. You SHOULD have a say.

[RevSpaminator]

12:01 PM on 05/16/2011

Paying for my information is a waste of money. I make a point of NOT buying from anyone who targets me with a popup add.

[Phil Waste]

07:16 PM on 05/21/2011

You got that right. I won't buy anything from a ad especially if it is pushed at me. The type of ad I abhor is the newer car ads that use returning veterans to tug at your heart strings while trying to sell you a car.

[Linda from Deerfield]

12:23 AM on 05/16/2011

Listen up, business people. You can pay all you want for my personal data, and you can hound me all you want, but if it doesn't save me money or make me money or serve my own very specific purposes -- like strengthening my community and my nation instead of draining it -- I'm not buying.

[jsgaetano]

02:29 PM on 05/15/2011

It's impossible to be free when you're bought and sold in a marketplace.
 
And yet, conservatives will endlessly try deluding people into thinking they offer freedom with their market-based everything.

[single malt]

07:48 PM on 05/15/2011

This story has nothing to do with conservatives. Must be nice to have someone else to blame for all your problems. Most conservatives off the web are likely just like most democrats, in the middle. What you see and hear online is the more exciting poles.

[jsgaetano]

01:20 PM on 05/16/2011

It has everything to do with conservatives.
 
They've spent years weakening consumer protections, and they still want to dismantle the few which remain.
 
Look at how desperate conservatives are to destroy the Consumer Protection Agency.

[mumi009]

06:00 AM on 05/16/2011

About the marketplace and freedom ("Easy Rider" 1969):

"George Hanson: Oh, no. What you represent to them is freedom.

Billy: What the hell is wrong with freedom? That's what it's all about.

George Hanson: Oh, yeah, that's right. That's what's it's all about, all right. But talkin' about it and bein' it, that's two different things. I mean, it's real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace. Of course, don't ever tell anybody that they're not free, 'cause then they're gonna get real busy killin' and maimin' to prove to you that they are. Oh, yeah, they're gonna talk to you, and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom. But they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em.

Billy: Well, it don't make 'em runnin' scared.

George Hanson: No, it makes 'em dangerous. Buh, neh! Neh! Neh! Neh! Swamp! "

[RevSpaminator]

12:00 PM on 05/16/2011

Very true. Somewhere we lost that idea. Even the word "liberal" no longer stands for someone who believes in individual freedom. As the screaming pundits remind us, it has been redefined to mean "granola-hugging tree-munching socialist yippie."

[privachi]

03:58 AM on 05/15/2011

Wow! Amazing seeing these in numbers. I hope users start realizing that their data is important and that they need to be in control of it!

Privachi (www.privachi.net), a privacy-centric social network, gives users the benefits of a social network while letting them own their social information. On Privachi, messages that a user posts are “locked” in such a way that even Privachi servers can’t unlock them, only the user’s friends can. In addition, user updates, photos, and videos are stored in locations that the user chooses (even locations outside Privachi servers, if the users chooses them)  to prevent any one service from knowing everything about the user. Photos, videos, or comments deleted by a user are truly erased since they are stored in the user specified location such as the user’s box.net or dropbox account. We hope Privachi provides a fun social network for users while helping them protect themselves from social profiling and putting them back in control of their social data.

[maxben]

02:56 PM on 05/15/2011

An ad? Really?
Don't you think you are turning people off with this spam?

[bkerensa]

10:58 PM on 05/15/2011

Just flag this shameful spammer!

[SimonFromSydney]

09:05 PM on 05/15/2011

privacy centric social networking is an oxymoron, you cant have privacy when you share information.

[Kzinga]

02:30 AM on 05/15/2011

I always wondered how free sites could reap billions .

Facebook also helps to decrease the married population - thats a business too right ? what a great economy

[jsgaetano]

02:29 PM on 05/15/2011

Facebook should get subsidies from the lawyer industrial complex.

[one tequila two tequila]

12:48 AM on 05/15/2011

I have no facebook, will not buy on internet...

[jsgaetano]

02:30 PM on 05/15/2011

Buying on the internet is safe, just confine your purchases to specific vendors you trust.

[maxben]

02:57 PM on 05/15/2011

Like Sony?

[one tequila two tequila]

06:23 PM on 05/15/2011

I don't thing any site with customers email and credit card numbers is safe.
Thank you anyway

[First namepat Sharp]

12:20 AM on 05/15/2011

They waste more $ sending me catelogues I can't afford to buy from, than they gain by having my info.
With incomes flat, SS static, unemployment widespread, & basics doubling in price, WHAT DO THEY HOPE TO GAIN?
Can't get blood from a stone.

[Stewart Goss]

12:41 AM on 05/15/2011

Stop whining, you get a lot of free stuff out of this.

[Natalie Longurl]

09:05 AM on 05/15/2011

time to send the unsolicited door to door salesman to your home, every day for a month. lets see whose whining then.

[jsgaetano]

02:32 PM on 05/15/2011

Yep.  In exchange for "free stuff", you get to have your personal information sold to people you don't know, so they can do things you don't know with it.
 
Whenever someone sends me a "free offer", I know full well the always-high costs of "free".  All the junk mail I receive is proof of it.

[CrookWatch]

11:46 PM on 05/14/2011

Corporations know no bounds when it comes to making a buck. Customers are ripe for the picking and anyone or anything that gets in the way of that will be destroyed.

[LogicCircuit]

10:00 PM on 05/14/2011

I don't understand how selling private data without that persons consent is legal in the U.S.

I relocated here a year ago, so I was what you would call a clean slate. Unsolicited Credit Card offers began to arrive after I opened a bank account.

And after I ordered some basics once from Hanes' website, I began receiving a crazy ammount of shopping catalogs from everyone and their sister. What's worse, they are following me every time I move.

I'm very frugal about giving out my personal info, don't even have facebook. But if companies or banks I chose to do business with abuse my trust like that, it can't possibly be legal!

[JuergenHartl]

11:19 PM on 05/14/2011

Welcome to America!

[one tequila two tequila]

12:51 AM on 05/15/2011

Welcome to America, land of the greedy

[littlebrowngirl]

08:17 PM on 05/14/2011

FB is genius because people willing provide their information.

[philistine]

08:06 PM on 05/14/2011

I'll give them a dollar to leave me off their lists.

[philistine]

08:13 PM on 05/14/2011

- not that I should have to.

[Stewart Goss]

12:41 AM on 05/15/2011

and if everyone followed your example many services would no longer be free

[bryanzth]

07:47 PM on 05/14/2011

They keep wanting me to give my phone number, FB, Google et al.

I just give 'em Time and Temperature. ONLY MY CLOSEST BUDS get my phone number.

BZ.

[David Landry]

05:01 PM on 05/14/2011

How much does a single electronic copy of a song cost? I mean really cost, not how much they sell it for ... probably less than a penny; far less ... yet I can't legally just go take it without permission and paying for it.

Why the double standard?

[Imhotep40]

07:53 PM on 05/14/2011

The problem is that a lot of the info. is public record, and the other part is voluntarily and freely given by consumers every time we do an electronic transaction or use a merchants "club" or "savings" card..

Another financial leech are the credit reporting agencies Equifax, TransUnion and Experian. My creditors gleefully submit my personal information and they create a proprietary scoring algorithm that they attempt to sell back to me by way of credit protection!

[teksquisite]

12:48 PM on 05/15/2011

Haha - don't get me started on the credit reporting agencies... I 100% agree with everything you said :)