Data Pirates and Getting a Share of the Booty

Seems like data piracy (illegal sharing of logon IDs and scraping data) is costing the financial information industry around $8 billion in subscription revenue each year reports Inside Market Data. My first reaction is that $8 billion is a lot to loose, and shows just how (surprisingly?) big the whole market is ($23 billion apparently). My second is that I wonder how many end-users who share logins illegally would not that if they faced the full costs, so maybe the number should be a lot less? Either way the stat is interesting, particularly at a time when Bloomberg seems (!) to be taking a more constructive stance on data provision and partnering. Ironic also that the report suggests that the biggest set of guilty parties on illegal page scraping are the data vendors themselves, checking on each others data.

The company that put the survey together, Burton-Taylor, seem to have some interesting background on the major data vendors. The first is on news content, saying that Bloomberg seems to concentrate on news alerts whereas Reuters seems to put more emphasis on news analysis.  The second shows shows financial information/analysis revenue broken down by vendor and geography in 2008, showing how dominant Thomson Reuters and Bloomberg are in the US and EMEA, with Quick having significant share with the big two in Asia. The third shows revenue broken down by segment and geography with FX/Fixed Income Sales & Trading, Equity Sales & Trading, Investment Management and Corporate expenditure dominating.