Not broadly true in my opinion. To give an example from the financial services industry: * Satellite provider or analytics firm sells "car counts" for retail s

Not broadly true in my opinion. To give an example from the financial services industry: * Satellite provider or analytics firm sells "car counts" for retail stores * Financial institution is intrigued; this must correlate with sales, right? * But..why don't we just buy credit card transaction data and foot traffic data from clearing houses and GPS trace providers? I often liken satellite imagery to salt. It's great to finish a dish, but should never be consumed alone. If you don't believe the foot traffic data or credit card transaction data you're buying, you can use satellite data to check it or refine the model. But that's a niche within a niche. The other issue I pointed out in that article is customer savvy--if you're a quant fund sophisticated enough to make use of an arcane data feed, you're very likely sophisticated enough to generate that feed yourself from raw data. And if you do it yourself, it's suddenly part of a "proprietary" solution. So you'd rather just buy images and do the heavy lifting that pay a premium to buy a data feed that doesn't quite solve your problem by itself.