How deals are classified
Two tests, applied in order, always from the data owner’s seat.
Who receives the value?
Internal — the asset makes the owner’s own operations or existing offer better, and no external party pays for it → improve. Stop here.
External — an external party pays → go to test 2.
What is that party paying for?
The data, or an insight derived from it, is the deliverable — it is the line item → sell.
A product the data is inseparable from — the buyer cannot purchase the data without buying the product → wrap.
The cases that catch people out
- Data staying internal does not make it improve. A diagnostic that reads images inside the hospital and returns a finding is a sell: the images never moved, but the finding is what was bought.
- A subscription is not a wrap. Ask what is bought, not how often it is paid for.
- Retail media is a wrap. Advertisers buy placements; the first-party data is inseparable from the inventory rather than purchasable on its own.
- An acquisition priced on the data asset is a sell from the target’s seat. An acquisition of tooling or people, where no data asset changes hands, has no route at all.
The rake, and when it is “on loan”
The rake is the share of the value created that a data business keeps, deal after deal. It is owned where the owner does the enrichment. It is on loan where a partner does it: there is a rake, but it is contingent — if the partner walks, the value walks with them.
Where the buyer does the enrichment there is no downstream rake at all. The owner sold an input for a fee and the buyer keeps what it builds, permanently. A renewal in that arrangement re-prices the next licence; it does not recover the last one. The question worth asking there is whether the fee was under-priced — which is a sharper criticism, not a softer one.
Two kinds of non-answer
Unclear means there is a route but the public facts do not settle which. These entries are published anyway — a named deal marked unclear is more useful than a confident guess. No route means the event is not a monetisation event at all: a standards document, a capability acquisition. Those are reviewed and left out entirely.
What this register cannot show
Improve has no counterparty, so it produces no announcement. A register built from public disclosures structurally under-counts it. Nothing here is a complete picture of how data is monetised — only of how it is monetised in public.