Knowing you have a data business hiding in your archive is one thing. Knowing exactly what to build is another. This is the follow-up to our first piece for A Media Operator, and it gives publishers an actual map.
It starts with a taxonomy: five categories of data business worth knowing, spanning risk management, regulatory compliance, operational decisions, commercial decisions, and benchmarking or competitive intelligence. Most B2B publishers already sit closest to that last category, given how naturally journalism lends itself to tracking who's ahead, who's behind, and why.
From there, the piece breaks the actual mechanics into three questions any publisher needs to answer: how do you collect the data, how do you transform it, and how do you deliver it. Collection is table stakes, and increasingly something AI can do too. Transformation, turning a pile of numbers into an index, benchmark or point of view that carries your brand's authority, is where the real defensibility lives. Delivery, whether via spreadsheet, platform or API, determines how sticky the product becomes.
The argument that should worry every publisher still relying on pure aggregation: if AI can gather the same public data you can, aggregation alone has no future. Transformation is what survives.
Read the full playbook on A Media Operator
Ready to work out where you sit in this taxonomy? Talk to 67 Bricks
