Apple’s recent acquisition of Locationary, a big data business mapping service, reflects the company’s ongoing efforts to expand its mapping capabilities.
Apple’s Locationary deal is now the fourth mapping acquisition the company has made in recent years – in addition to Placebase, C3 Technologies, and Poly9.
These deals are representative of the techniques that media companies are applying to extend their uses of big data and analytics to increase their offerings to subscribers as well as their revenue.
For Apple, Locationary offers a merged listing service in which it crowdsources and inputs data it into its Saturn data exchange platform.
So not only does the approach help to validate the accuracy of the geolocation data, it also offers other related data, such as opening times for restaurants and retail outlets.
Companies such as Google, Facebook, Amazon, and Netfllix have set the standard for using big data to drive new revenue streams.
Netflix and Amazon are using mountains of data gathered on customer viewing habits to develop their own highly-targeted programming such as Netflix’s House of Cards series, as Satya Ramaswamy notes in a recent blog post for Harvard Business Review.
By using a blend of customer behavior data and analytics, both Netflix and Amazon have been able to design new TV series that are statistically proven to score big with viewers.
For instance, House of Cards has hauled in 2 million new Netflix subscribers in the US through the first quarter of 2013, representing a 7% increase over the previous quarter, according to Ramaswamy.
One of the biggest benefits to using big data analytics is to learn more about what customers and prospects want and identify what matters most to them, then crafting a strategy to execute on those needs.
For instance, Lauren Zalaznick, executive vice president of NBC Universal, helped turn around Bravo by identifying the five key interests of its target audience and providing them more of what they craved, including series such as Top Chef and the Real Housewives, notes Wetpaint CEO Ben Elowitz in a blog post for All Things Digital.
The use of big data to drive additional revenue streams isn’t exclusive to consumer-facing media companies.
A growing number of B2B publishers are also taking advantage of big data and analytics to bolster their top lines. For example, companies such as Access Intelligence are leveraging data and analytics tools to convert individual subscriptions to site licenses, enabling an employer to pay for access to media content for all or a select group of employees.
