What’s My Data Worth: A History of Restaurant Data Markets (Part 2)
This is part 2 of a 2-part series. Part 1 can be found here.
While GuestMetrics was acquiring data through long distribution cycles of its commoditized reporting products, Restaurant Sciences decided to buy data upfront to reach projectability quickly, figuring they could migrate to offering ‘value-added’ information products once they’d reached critical mass. Bankrolled by Jeff Katz, one of the founding partners of Mercury Payments, Restaurant Sciences paid between $10 and $20 per month per rooftop for restaurant locations that had material adult beverage sales. The theory was that paying for data outright would speed up the data collection, and Restaurant Sciences would sell the data — after cleaning it — for more than they paid, netting themselves the spread. And in 3 years, Restaurant Sciences had indeed built a book of over 28,000 establishments providing full data.
