Six things that decide what your data is worth

info@xferdata.com (Xferdata) — Fri, 04 Sep 2026 15:20:08 GMT

Two companies of the same size, in the same sector, with what looks like the same data, can come back with valuations an order of magnitude apart. The difference is almost never the subject matter. It is these six things.

How far back it goes

The single biggest factor, and the one you cannot fix. A buyer needs enough history to test a signal against outcomes they already know. Eighteen months of data cannot be back-tested against a downturn that happened three years ago. Ten years can. This is why a slightly boring dataset with a decade behind it beats an interesting one that started last year.

How often it arrives

A dataset that updates once a quarter is a report. One that updates daily is a feed. Feeds are bought as subscriptions and priced annually. Reports are bought once and haggled over. If your systems can deliver daily and you are delivering monthly, you are being paid for the wrong product.

How granular it is

Aggregated data has usually had the useful part removed. A monthly total tells a buyer what happened. Individual transactions tell them why, and let them cut the data in ways you have not thought of. The more you summarize before you sell, the fewer buyers you have.

How much of it is adjusted after capture

Data that comes straight from the source is worth more than data that has been cleaned, corrected, reconciled or restated. Every adjustment is a decision somebody made, and a buyer has to model that decision before they can trust the number. If more than a fifth of your data is touched after capture, expect questions.

How much ground it covers

Geographic and market coverage widens the buyer pool rather than raising the price per buyer. A dataset covering one country has one set of buyers. The same dataset covering twelve has several sets, and several buyers bidding is what moves a price.

Whether anyone else has it

The hardest to judge from the inside. Most companies assume their data is ordinary because they look at it every day. Uniqueness is not about the subject, it is about the combination: this activity, at this granularity, over this period, from this vantage point. A buyer will pay for a view they cannot assemble anywhere else, and they are usually better placed than you to know whether it exists.

What to do with this

Two of the six you can change. Refresh frequency is usually an engineering decision rather than a data one. Granularity is often a matter of what you export rather than what you hold.

The other four are what they are. Which is the point of putting a number on it before you commit to anything.

This is the market we run

Xferdata values a company's data, builds the auction pack, and runs the auction to buyers globally.

If you own the data, run a valuation and find out what yours is worth.

If you buy data, sign up and tell us what you are after. You will see packs as they come to market.

Google paid $10 million for a bankrupt airline's emails

emilija.stojilkovic@xferdata.com (Emilija Stojilkovic) — Wed, 02 Sep 2026 21:50:25 GMT

In August a US bankruptcy court took bids on an unusual asset. Not aircraft, not gates, not the loyalty programme, but Spirit Airlines' own internal records: roughly 100 million emails, around 500 million Teams messages, HR files and presentations, all deidentified.

Google bid $10 million and won it. Mercor, an AI hiring platform, was the underbidder at $7.5 million. It ran as a competitive auction, which is the only reason there is a price to talk about.

It's worth being clear about what changed hands, because a lot of the coverage wasn't. This was the company's internal corporate record rather than its passenger database. The flight attendants' union has objected to the sale, and that objection matters, because consent and provenance are now part of what any buyer has to work through.

Why anyone wants this

Most of the open web has already been used as training material, and what the labs are short of now is an authentic record of how work actually gets done. How a decision got escalated, how a scheduling problem was argued out over three days, what a handover between shifts looks like when nobody is writing for an audience. You can't scrape that, because it was never public, and you can't synthesise it convincingly. A twenty year internal archive is one of the few places it exists.

That's one kind of buyer. There is a second kind, and they want almost the opposite thing. AI buyers want a one-off corpus: large, messy, unpolished, bought once. Funds, data aggregators and market intelligence firms want something narrow and structured instead, things like prices, volumes, lead times and churn, delivered on a schedule so one month can be compared against the next. A single dump is close to useless to them. A clean monthly feed is not.

Most businesses can serve one of those two buyers reasonably well, and hardly any of them have looked at their own systems and worked out which one.

Why this shouldn't only happen in bankruptcy

A bankruptcy is a forced sale, and that is the only reason anyone knows what Spirit's archive was worth. Everything gets listed, valued and sold, including the things nobody bothered to value while the business was still trading.

A going concern never runs that process. The data sits on the balance sheet as nothing, so the option to do something with it never gets priced and never gets used. A business eight years into the same accounting system and six years into the same CRM is holding a version of the same asset. Smaller, obviously, but with one advantage Spirit's archive doesn't have: it is still being added to every day, and a recurring feed is worth more than a final one.

This is the market we run

Xferdata values a company's data, builds the auction pack, and runs the auction to buyers globally.

If you own the data — sign up and run the assessment. It takes minutes and tells you whether what you hold is worth taking to auction, and what it's likely to be worth.

If you buy data — whether you're training models or looking for recurring feeds, sign up and tell us what you're after. You'll see packs as they come to market.

Xferdata Blog

Six things that decide what your data is worth

How far back it goes

How often it arrives

How granular it is

How much of it is adjusted after capture

How much ground it covers

Whether anyone else has it

What to do with this

This is the market we run

Google paid $10 million for a bankrupt airline's emails

Why anyone wants this

Why this shouldn't only happen in bankruptcy

This is the market we run