Verb.AI Pays Gen Zers For Their Data

Washington, D.C.-based, youth-focused polling company Generation Lab created a new app called VERB.AI, which is offering young people at least $50 per month to track them online and use the insights for market research.

The Big Picture: It’s old news that every major website and social media platform tracks its users, leading some states to give people the option to opt out. But the prevalence of the practice (and the online Whac-A-Mole to stop it) is exhausting some users… so it’s inevitable that some would rather just receive a paycheck for what’s already been happening for free.

Behind the Payments: How much is your privacy worth to you?

• VERB.AI will pay users $50 or more per month (depending on internet usage) in exchange for placing a digital tracker that can monitor everything they browse, buy, stream, and whatever else they do online, per Fast Company.
• The platform creates a digital twin of each user. Companies who use Generation Lab can “query the data in a ChatGPT-like interface and get a more accurate picture of consumer preferences than they would get even from a room full of Gen Zers.”

The Future: Even though Gen Z reportedly protects their data more than any other generation, they also are likely to agree that they “don’t mind being tracked by website or apps,” per a 2023 Malwarebytes survey. 88% of Gen Zers are willing to personally share data if they’re “fairly compensated either with cash or a personalized social media algorithm,” according to a 2022 Euromonitor International study.

In other words, there’s a price on letting go of your privacy.

Prediction: The global data broker market is expected to balloon from $389.7 billion to $561.5 billion by 2029. It’s possible that the growth could be partly driven by people who are willing to offer up their data as passive income.