On Monday, January 18, 2016, Yahoo announced that it is sharing over 13.5TB of data encapsulating 4 months of usage data. 110 billion instances of 20 million users are being shared with the academic institutions to allow data scientists and academics access to the ‘largest-ever machine learning data set.”

This is exciting news for internet marketing companies because it will expose students to an incredible opportunity to understand how users are interacting with the web. Accurately predicting human interaction with the web is one of the greatest problems that businesses face.

It’s been our experience that many data scientists have little to no interest in working with digital marketing companies. The common objections are ‘it’s not what I’m passionate about, I have no interest in marketing, isn’t that all about ads?’

While this may sound rather negative, it’s understandable if you look at the datasets available to college students looking to specialize in data science. Until this dataset donation by Yahoo, most datasets are tied to hard sciences (astronomy, physics, biomedical or financial markets.) It’s our hope that the access to this type of information (how people interacted with Yahoo properties) will lead more students down a path of using the power of machine learning to improve the digital marketing industry.

How people interact with the web is incredibly interesting and rather complicated (numerous variables and factors), it’s a shame that more data scientists aren’t interested in it…yet. We’re wagering that hidden in these datasets are some truths or breakthroughs waiting to be discovered.

Heck, if the industry improves enough, we might even consider turning off our adblockers.

To read more, check out The Independents article here

Tags: big data, data science, digital advertising, machine learning