The journey of your data, Who owns it?

First, second and third party data

You may have heard about the first party, second party and third party data.

This classification is according to who collects them and here we must distinguish between two entities, advertisers and content publishers.

Advertisers

If we look at the previous image of El Universal newspaper, we see that the advertisers are those who promote their products, in the banner above netshoes and below despegar.com.

These have profile information for people who click on your ad.

Content editors

In the same image, who develops and publishes the content is El Universal,  the newspaper offers its information to visitors for free and sells its spaces to advertisers.

First party data

They are called first party because they are collected by the owner of the site, the data is his and, generally, it has no cost to him.

The cost is in attracting visitors to the site and keeping them entertained and interested in the articles and reports.

Third party data

I will first explain third-party data because they are much more common than second party data.

The data of third parties are those that are obtained (acquired) through an intermediary.

In the El Universal example, the third party could be a data provider that pays to allow them to collect data about visitors; in order to create more complete customer profiles and sell them to advertisers so that they are able to create ads better targeted to the type of prospects they are looking for.

Third-party data are the most common and serve to complement the first party data and, using remarketing strategies, reach visitors when they are on external sites.

Second party data

They are halfway between their own, first party and external, third-party.

Being a more recent concept, in this scheme, an editor is associated with another company to give him direct access to his audience data.

It is second party because the data is not from a third party's own site, but it takes it directly from where it is created, so it does not need intermediaries to do it.

These data have better quality than those of third parties but it is more complicated to reach agreements to share them.

Why are our data collected?

The idea behind collecting data on all the websites we visit, serves for advertisers to present us with better offers, based on our tastes, what we buy, read or see on the internet and, in this way, be more effective both in terms of investment of your budget as of satisfaction of the clients who will see products that are more likely to please or need at a certain moment.

Privacy of the data

It is important to note that our data is moved by different and very diverse hands, whether they are anonymous (cookies, clicks data) or that lead us to identify ourselves personally (email addresses, name).

Our data is the price we pay for accessing free content.

Since advertisers pay for most "free" internet content and other media.

Data is the fuel that moves the internet and has become the new natural resource.