Advertising revenues; customer subscription fees; database rentals; licensing fees; pay-for-use fees for tools; platform usage fees – a variety of ways in which organisations have generated revenues and created value. A new source and an emerging trend is leveraging valuable data! Creating value through rich information of customer behaviour and preferences is fast emerging as the new ‘deep sea’ discovery for a number of start-ups to mine.

AdAge’s article reports how Foursquare will mine it’s customer data and offer location-related data, to generate additional revenue. This is a great example in how a new source of revenue may be built off a core business, which generates insights that many organisations would find valuable.

While many startups are riding the big data wave by creating tools and services that help organizations leverage data and analytics, selling harnessed data is fast emerging as a new way for startups to create increased value while adding a precious source of revenue.

Google, Yahoo and others have harnessed big data to solve several business challenges and to find increased ways of engaging with their core constituents of users and advertisers. Similarly, organisations today make most business decisions either based on or supported by extensive use of data and analytics.

A number of startups are fast recognising this trend and are seeing data-driven services as a new opportunity and source of revenue. A recent case in point is AchieveMint. While a first look reveals a very sensible program offering consumers rewards for subscribing to ‘healthy’ behaviour, one starts to wonder how an organisation would seek to fund the value of the rewards it would offer subscribers. Going by a Mashable article it is clear that AchieveMint, will in-fact monetiseit’s rich health data of the several consumers it will have through its app. While it seems very logical and simple in hindsight, it will be critical for organisations to ensure they do not make lofty business plans and revenue & valuation projections based on data driven information of their users. Instead they will be well served to focus, at least initially, entirely on creating innovative services that consumers will find extremely valuable and trustworthy and will generate huge amounts of insightful information through it’s use and subscription.

Once this is done, a more sustainable revenue stream can be considered through use of this by established brands seeking more meaningful targeting of and engagement with prospective customers.