Public Data
This category posts talk or work regarding the public data and how a business can use it for better decisions and actions
-
Demographics by ZIP code: the free federal data B2C founders use instead of Experian
The paid demographic-data industry – Experian Mosaic, Claritas PRIZM, Nielsen Segmentation – is worth over $10 billion a year. B2C brands can access similar data from the government’s data source for free. Most of what these tools sell is one dataset in a nice wrapper: the American Community Survey. The ACS is the deepest public source of demographic data in the United States, published every year by the US Census Bureau, and available at every ZIP code in the country. Usually, this is the beginning layer for most of the audience tools that power the demographic layer. Most of the D2C players don’t know its existence, and even if they…
You May Also Like
The 11 public datasets every US D2C brand should be using
-
The 11 public datasets every US D2C brand should be using
The data was always there. The joins weren’t. D2C founders pay $499 a month for audience insights, a few hundred more for a Meta ad partner claiming proprietary demographic data, and another chunk for lookalike models built on data anyone can pull for free. The federal government publishes better data than most of what these tools resell. Household income at every ZIP in America. Category-level spending by income bracket. Where affluent households are relocating. Where broadband can actually support your video checkout. What Americans have stopped doing with their time. None of it is hidden. All of it is free. Most of it has been publicly available for over a…
