Uprising app monetization models with public data collection

Web pages, mobile apps, social media, and any other place where you register and use online, collects and contains information about every user. And in most cases, its not even personal data that is getting collected. User data can be resourceful and useful for many companies to carry out researches, create networks, products or just simply analyze the market. In this sense – user data is a goldmine for any company that could be interested in this.

If you are an app developer, obviously, you want to get the most out of your work and time invested so it would pay off, and you could develop more production. So to make the most of your app, you should explore the non-obvious ways to monetize it. Everybody knows about monetization strategies that suggest adding ads, in-app purchases or subscriptions to your app. But what about data monetization?

In most cases, for data monetization purposes you can use either SDK or API to implement in to your application or code that would gather basic non-personal parameters from the user’s device and use them for monetization purposes. In general, non-personal information includes device type, device version, screen size, mobile operator, network type, CPU Core number, RAM, ROM, country, IP address. After this data is collected, it’s transferred to a data collector. The data collector is the company that gathers the user’s data. Advertisers, brands, marketers, research institutes and telecom companies are the most common and biggest data collectors on the market, but every company or product could be a data collector. So the more data collectors you have, the higher percentage of your app data will be monetized, which will be noticeable in receiving more revenue from monetization. 
You don’t have to gather all of the possible non-personal information to be able to get revenue from it, as you can simply choose one or few of those features available.

If SDK or API grants access to something like device type, device version, screen size, country or IP address, it’s usually for companies, that use this data to analyze what kind of devices are mostly used, what kind of screen size is the most comfortable for people, or similar kind of research. This data might also be used for the app’s optimization, based on the most popular devices that are being used. There are a lot of companies that could be interested in this kind of data: specific brands, research companies, marketing companies, or even your phone service providing company.

A bit of a different turn goes for data collection that needs mobile operator, network type, country and IP address. It could be used for researches targeted towards finding out the target audience based on specific location, monitoring accessibility from different countries or cities, or simply researching how fast various pages are loaded based on the user’s location. These are more technical ways of how non-personal user data could be used. 

Even though it sounds serious, none of these methods use high amount of users data or battery life. Obviously, it still means, that when you are adding a 3rd party SDK or API to your application or program, you are supposed to get the user’s consent. This requires mentioning everything in Terms of Service that users are agreeing to.

Even though data monetization is a pretty new thing in general, it is taking lead in the market. All in all, data monetization is a solution on how the developer can monetize their application and how the technology industry is using that collected data to improve existing services or devices.

Based on this, there are some SDKs that would be perfect, to monetize data:

GlobalHop
One of the least demanding monetization SDK, as it asks for IP and network connection. When a device with embedded GlobalHop SDK application is in an idle state and connected to WiFi, HTTP requests are being routed through the user’s device to various websites to extract public data. It doesn’t slow down user’s device or drain its battery. Fits best if developer doesn't want to show ads to users, or wants to use more than one SDK in his application. Works on Android devices and Windows.

UNITY ADS
Created by the leading mobile game engine, the Unity Ads SDK provides a comprehensive monetization framework for your game, whether you develop in Unity, xCode, or Android Studio. It streamlines ads, in-app purchasing and analytics, using cutting edge machine learning to maximize your revenue while maintaining a great player experience. It works on both Android and iOS, and supports several display formats. Works well with other SDKs added to application.

LIFTOFF
Liftoff is a full-service mobile app marketing and retargeting platform that uses post-install data to run true ROI-optimized user acquisition and retention campaigns. With Liftoff, campaigns are optimized to drive actions beyond the install, like booking a hotel, subscribing to a service, or making a purchase. It also asks for some personal data, so you should implement that in to your Terms of Service. Works on both Android and iOS devices.