Your Data Has a Price. Here’s How to Calculate It.
3 things to help creators see what your data is actually worth.
People have been asking me what they can do. How do they protect themselves? How do they fight back? The first step is understanding what you have.
Your data has value. Your voice, your images, your creative work, your browsing patterns, your purchase history, all of it has a price. Companies know this. That’s why they’re collecting it. The problem is that most people don’t know the price, so they give it away for free.
There are three things that determine what your data is worth.
1. Uniqueness
How rare is your data? This is the single biggest factor most people don’t think about.
AI models are trained on whatever data is most available. That means mainstream American English is everywhere in training data. But a woman from New Orleans? Underrepresented. A photographer who curated 12,000 images of diverse communities? Rare. A voice dataset from rural Appalachia, or coastal West Africa, or indigenous communities? Extremely rare.
Scarcity drives value. The less of your data that exists in current training sets, the more valuable it is to anyone building AI that needs to work for communities like yours. If the AI already has a plethora of examples of your data type, adding more doesn’t move the needle. If it has almost none? Your contribution could be the difference between a model that works and one that fails.
2. Usability
Do you have clean rights and consent? This is where most data falls apart.
Right now there are two kinds of data in the AI world. Scraped data, taken from the internet without asking, with unclear rights, carrying legal risk that increases every day as lawsuits pile up. And consented data, contributed voluntarily, with explicit permission, clear terms, and a documented chain of rights.
Consented data is the premium product. Companies building responsible AI, especially in regulated industries like healthcare and finance, need data they can defend in court. Scraped data is a liability. Consented data is an asset. That’s leverage you have that you might not realize.
3. Use
What are the terms? This is where the money lives, and where most creators get robbed.
A one-time research license is worth less than an unlimited commercial license. A license limited to one specific AI model is worth less than one that covers all future models. A license for one year is worth less than a perpetual license. The scope, duration, and use case of the license all change the price.
I saw this firsthand. Adobe used my images under a license meant for distributing to end users. They stretched it to cover AI training. The use changed completely. The compensation didn’t change at all. Some unscrupulous companies are trying to redefine ‘use’ after the fact, in their favor.
[Bonus] Intrinsic Value
There is also intrinsic value that companies use all the time to justify things such as valuations; I will dive more into this in the data collective because this alone is a deep conversation. There are many factors that you can apply to help determine intrinsic value.
From Product to Supplier
When you understand uniqueness, usability, and use, something shifts. You stop thinking of yourself as a user who generates data as a byproduct of using an app. You start thinking of yourself as a supplier who has something companies need.
Because you are. AI doesn’t work without data. And the best data, unique, clean, consented, properly licensed, is getting harder to find, not easier. Every lawsuit, every regulation, every public backlash about scraped data makes your consented data more valuable.
That’s why I started the Data Collective. Not just to protect your data, but to help you understand what it’s worth and how to benefit from it. I’ll be sharing more about how to think about this, how to price it, and how to start monetizing what you already have.
Your data has a price.
“When you understand uniqueness, usability, and use, you stop being the product. You start being the supplier.”