Understanding Your Data Acquisition Cost

One of the most important aspects of running a data business is understanding your true data acquisition cost. Whether you are dealing with translation of equipment specs or contact information extraction, you need to know the complete cost to acquire, clean and input data across a complete maintenance cycle.

The 3 main points of the data cycle that could each carry unique costs are:

• Cost to acquire raw data
• Cost to clean raw data
• Cost to input cleaned data into your CMS/admin system

As you analyze your costs for each of the 3 steps in acquiring and inputting data, you’ll need to do this analysis for each of the major data types you have.

Once you benchmark these costs, you can then work towards speed improvements that can drive cost savings, like web extraction for public data that’s semi-structured or Mechanical Turk utilization for non-web data that’s less structured.