The Money Game of Embodied Data

"Someone kept talking to me about 20 yuan an hour. I said I pay collectors 40 yuan an hour—are you asking me to lose 20? In the end I learned that the upstream party was giving him 40 yuan."

This was said to me and Wali by Mr. Yue, head of a data collection executing party in Shandong, during recent exchanges with more than 10 companies in the data industry chain.

They have considerable resources and can mobilize students from more than a dozen local schools to collect data, taking orders from upstream data vendors and also handling the final data collection.

But he himself does not dare to subcontract further. Several teams that could not find work came to him for subcontracting, and he refused: "Taking 10 or 8 yuan off the top is meaningless. If I subcontract it out, I can't control the quality, and I can't answer to my client."

There is another point. The lowest price peers offer collectors is 30 yuan an hour. "30 is a threshold." If a person wears a device and collects for eight hours a day, effective data amounts to only three or four hours, earning just over 100 yuan in hard-earned money. Any lower and no one would do it.