Thread: Suggestions invited: Selling Lists of site users to a big organization

One of the very big organizations has contacted me to get the database of my site users.

I tried getting some more details and tried to push my site for marketing purposes a bit but the sales manager of the company is keen to get only the site users DB.

What do you guys suggest? On what basis should I charge the "cost of my DB"?

Originally Posted by geekology

One of the very big organizations has contacted me to get the database of my site users.

I tried getting some more details and tried to push my site for marketing purposes a bit but the sales manager of the company is keen to get only the site users DB.

What do you guys suggest? On what basis should I charge the "cost of my DB"?

Price per user, I don't know in what niche, but in proxy niche it's around $0,10 upto $0,20 per user.. and proxy niche is mostly paying less than other niches so yeah..

What site is it? What niche?

Greetz

It totaly depends on the niche your DB is in. That will dictate the overall price you should charge per entry. As Aqu says, in the proxy sector details would be worth $0,10 upto $0,20 per user which is low. Consider the proxy niche as the worst, bottom of the barrel.

On the other hand if you have details of paying customers who subscribe to say an SEO service you offer, then their details would obviously be worth alot more.

In the enterprise IT (Information Technology) niche, almost no one will sell you their lists. They will send mailings to their lists for you, but they won't let you see the actual lists.

Your site might have some privacy policy... No? How can you sell someone's personal information without their consent? No offense but I think that's unethical or correct me if I am wrong (one of my teacher used to say that 'there is no such thing as ethical or unethical in business).

Well...if everything is fine, I would say that charge per user. May be $0.50 per user may be $1 depending on the nature of your users database.

Thanks for your answers everyone.

Niche is "Information Technology". What do you think the cost should be per user?

As F-GD rightly pointed out....Actually I am also getting second thoughts about selling list now... I talked with some of my friends and acc. to them it won't be ethical to sell the list... they say it would be good --as Will says --- that I should allow them to use my lists through me only.

I 'm sure if I say "No", the person is not going to come back. As the company is related 100% to my site's niche, i don't want to break relationship with him.

Feel like a "Catch 22" situation. What would you have done in such a scenario?

Well... to be honest... if you ask your members about this, most of them will not allow you to share this information with anyone. So, its clearly not fair to sell their information.

I can understand your situation and would suggest you to sell the database without members consent as long as you think that 'the company' will not use that for some illegal business or whatever. That's just a suggestion though

Company is of the ranks of I B M and O R A C L E so I don't think i should worry about the list be used for illegal purposes...

just that I am now unsure about whether the list should be sold even if it's going in safe hands.... thinking about what is the best possible answer to that person. Any suggestion?

What does your current privacy policy say?

You might say "Distributing our member list goes against our privacy policy, but we can send an email blast out to our entire member list for $X/member."

Thanks everyone for your suggestions... appreciate it.