NetProspex data trading

Hi Troy!  I enjoyed your story about NetProspex.  I used to work for this company https://www.[redacted].com/ but left because I simply did not agree with their business practices AT ALL.  I mention that because we were one of the biggest suppliers of data to NetProspex, so I thought you might be interested in learning how it actually works.  The nice version of the NetP story is that users supply data from their own contact list and get credits to download data from the system:  Give some/Get Some.  In reality ALL of the major data companies like Infogroup and Starista feed their own data into NetP at the scale you are talking about in your blog post:  huge multi-gigabyte csv files ftp'd to NetP and then matched against each other to create an optimal list of about 33 million contacts.  Most of the data is pure garbage, either scraped or very old.  A tiny percentage of the overall file, maybe 2-4 million records total, consists of good, verified contacts with valid phone numbers and email addresses.  In my case I used to buy the entire Dun and Bradstreet file of business records through a third party vendor (approximately 28 million records) and then run that file through append systems like Tower Data to get email addresses and THEN feed that entire processed file into the NetP database.

You might ask why?

Because I could get the entire Dun and Bradstreet B2B file for about $3000 and then, with a couple of cheap value added steps, feed that file into NetProspex and make about $15K per month.  How?  NetP pays large contributors to their database a royalty.  So instead of getting "credits" like a small user of the system would get, I would get paid a percentage of NetProspex total revenue as a royalty for letting them use "my" data.

The zinger is this:  B2B data is sold "per mille".  So you buy a list of 10000 contacts and you pay per thousand, not per contact.  Hence, everyone in the industry has an incentive to bloat the data as much as possible.  In other words, it almost always works out in my favor to buy B2B data from every source possible and then feed that data into NetProspex in order to get the royalty payment.