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HubSpot Acquires Clearbit
- xnx 3y agoIs it approximately correct that most sites (beside Google, Microsoft, Meta, etc.) that get your email address are selling it to data-brokers and sharing cookie/browser-signature information so you can be de-anonymized across the web?
- karaterobot 3y agoI would guess not most, but that a lot of them do. My assumption is that if there is a third-party service in use, there's a fair chance that a copy of my data is going to the third party in addition to the place I expect it to go. I have nothing but anecdotal information to back this up though.
- htrp 3y agoYes.
- yodon 3y ago>Yes Citation? Or just an assumption?
- hilbertseries 3y agoI don't think this is correct. Meta and Google don't sell direct access to your data. They sell advertising targeting you, based on your personal data. I'm pretty sure it's illegal to sell users email address to a data broker under GDPR.
- xnx 3y agoRight. Meta and Google are much less shady about this.
- ethbr1 3y agoNot really... they're just vertically integrated and have their own ad networks. Consequently, they're not protecting data because they care about privacy -- they're protecting data because the wider they share the raw data, the less value it (their product) is. It's economic self-interest, not ethics. If they didn't have ad networks, they'd sell anything and everything in a heartbeat.
- twicetwice 3y agoBe that as it may, their object-level behavior is still far less shady. And in fact this is an argument that it is good that they exist, because in the counterfactual world where they don't, their niche would be filled by these non-vertically-integrated data brokers and advertisers who ARE financially incentivized to leak and sell and share far more information. I used to be all gung-ho about being anti-FAANG, those evil privacy violators, but having now talked to friends who have worked at places like FB and Google, their internal data security practices are far more stringent than I had imagined (my friends complain about how difficult these rules make their jobs!). And yeah, sure, they are scooping up as much information about you as they can, and I'm not a big fan of that fact. But I have been convinced that they are actually somewhat decent stewards of that information, and the alternative is far worse. All that being said, this is a pretty loosely-held belief, and all the surveillance and so on is quite icky to me. I'm still trying to slowly de-google my life and all that, just with a bit less paranoia and urgency.
- ethbr1 3y ago> their niche would be filled by these non-vertically-integrated data brokers and advertisers who ARE financially incentivized to leak and sell and share far more information I look at it a slightly different way. Absent the vertical integration, they wouldn't dominate the market. Absent dominating the market, they wouldn't wield as many resources. Absent as many resources, they wouldn't have been able to build a panopticon in the first place. And even if there were excesses in an alternate world... there would be a market of competitors, which would encourage different behavior. And possibly even (gasp!) regulation because of the worst excesses. Instead, FAANG wield vast resources, culled from entrenched monopoly positions, and act just responsible enough (plus lobbying) to avoid regulation.
- bennyelv 3y agoIn the context of a business email address GDPR is far less restrictive. See GDPR Recital 47 (7): https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-47/ https://gdpr-info.eu/recitals/no-47/ Direct marketing is not explicitly banned. If you have a reason to believe that the data subject in question (a B2B person operating in the context of their work) is interested in buying your stuff then you could claim "legitimate interest" and process their contact details/market to them. That's what people are relying on at the moment. Whether all the data protection authorities in all the member states will agree with the market's assessment of this remains to be seen...
- nightpool 3y agoOne small piece of nuance here is that a lot of the times they're not selling your email address, they're hashing it and using it as an identifier for targeting on other sites (so that two sites that both have your email address can coordinate to sell you ads, but sites that don't already have your email address don't learn anything new).
- Xorlev 3y agoExcept it's also trivial to buy or produce tables of pre-hashed emails, so this cloak of "oh we don't know who you are, it's a hash!" is usually just lipservice.
- hiatus 3y ago> produce tables of pre-hashed emails Wouldn't this require knowledge of the email beforehand?
- mgillett54 3y agoI think the idea is that you can generate the MD5 hash of all, say 8 letter, @gmail.com addresses trivially and since the email hashes used for targeting don’t have a salt, it’s a one time “expense” to build the reverse lookup table
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- jgraettinger1 3y agoThey're not literally passing around the hash. Holders of hash(email) <=> browser cookie associations are heavily incentivized for both regulatory and also competitive reasons to not blast that information around the internet -- or even to let direct partners A & B identify overlaps without their being in the middle. When passing identifiers, there's generally some combination of lookup tables, per-distribution salted hashes, or encryption happening to make reverse mapping as difficult as possible. (I was in this space up until a few years ago).
- herval 3y agoit feels to me that to date, selling people's information remains as the only viable large business model of the internet, after ecommerce
- jahewson 3y agoNo, nobody is interested in de-anonymising, it’s not useful. To target, say a car ad all that is needed is to know that cookie 1234 is interested in buying a sports car, and when that cookie is encountered, serve it a sports car ad.
- gmmeyer 3y agoIt's very useful for b2b people to know who is looking at your website and who might be good targets to reach out to. Knowing that Steve the SVP at Databricks is looking at your website vs cookie 1234 is a pretty key differentiator
- jehb 3y agoThere are a lot of companies selling exactly this service. In some cases, they're able to do it pretty easily, because most people don't actually make any effort whatsoever to remain anonymous. And in a B2B setting, there's a good chance your own company is feeding their data into the same pool. Some companies are trying to sell you on "AI based" solutions that take deanonymization a step further, but as far as I can tell, it's mostly horseshit and wishful thinking.
- biggestdummy 3y agoI'm curious who these "companies selling exactly this service" are. I get solicited by dozens of companies daily. And I've seen nobody who can provide this de-annonymization of website visitors.
- jehb 3y agoYou're right, I phrased that too generically. What I mean is that they provide enough information to pair your first-party data with "anonymous" web traffic matched to the account level with enough granularity to line up the two. That said, most of the companies in this space massively over promise and under deliver. The one thing they all have in common is that they're good at ABM, so they can sell to your CMO/CRO faster than you can call them out on their bullshit.
- mritchie712 3y agoCurious what % of Clearbit revenue was from the Salesforce integration (which I imagine will be shut down). I remember years ago when I was looking to use Clearbit it was significantly more expensive to use directly from Salesforce.
- datadrivenangel 3y agoYou pay for the convenience.
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- andygcook 3y agoCurious to see how Clearbit will be integrated into HubSpot and if the Clearbit API will remain open for others to use. Are there any other viable competitors to Clearbit for coverage and quality? We have a legacy plan for my startup at a very good price, so I've never checked out the other options.
- bennyelv 3y agoHubspot have been working on how they improve the data that their customers have in their CRM system. The state of CRM data across companies is... variable to say the least, with a leaning towards the poor side. It's often entered by hand, by a salesperson with a telephone handset in the other hand. Typos, inaccuracy abound, which limits the ability to analyse and gain insight from the data, as well as to use it effectively in automated processes. Hubspot have been releasing features and changes that start to address this, and I expect powering it all with Clearbit data will be the first thing they do with this acquisition. There are quite a few companies competing in this space, so there are options if Clearbit shut the doors to use outside of Hubspot. My company is one of those, focusing on IP->Business matching, but also selling direct access to our database of business information in certain circumstances. (www.leadforensics.com).
- rasen58 3y agoVery neat. How do companies actually get/derive the data to do IP to business matching though?
- maxmorlocke 3y agoZoomInfo is in the same general area on quality and the price per record is competitive, but they have historically required a high minimum annual spend and have a reputation for litigiousness. There are a few other large players (e.g. apollo), a few medium sized players (e.g. coresignal, mixrank), and some smaller players (e.g. thecompanies, bigpicture). There are also a lot of other folks who are not as api-oriented and are more focused around the sales/marketing experience (e.g. seamless.ai)
- netcraft 3y ago> Now, imagine that once prospects’ and customers’ data are in HubSpot, our platform actively monitors those customers for buying intents. Not just based on direct engagements within the HubSpot platform, but also based on customers’ activities outside of HubSpot and around the web. And, when it’s time to reach out, imagine using generative A.I. powered by all of this rich data to create personal messages. That will be possible with Clearbit and HubSpot. I have a feeling this will be very successful - but could they do this for B2B?
- have_faith 3y agoThe AI can send the outreach messages, and then AI can respond. Then we can all go and retire on a beach while the AI's just bounce off of each ad infinitium.
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- strombofulous 3y agoUnfortunately, there aren't enough beaches to go around, so we will still have to pick winners and losers
- zoogeny 3y ago> we will still have to pick winners and losers Why would we do that? Surely there is an AI model that can do it for us.
- lancesells 3y agoThat's what the Vision Pro is for.
- Eumenes 3y ago> A.I. powered > personal messages
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- thiago_fm 3y agoClearbit's product wasn't that good anymore and they had just got the old CEO back as far as I can remember, they've sold it in a good time then. I wonder if it was a good purchase for HubSpot though, but who am I to judge those M&A's :-)
- warthog 3y agoWonder what the prices on the transaction was?
- nikolay 3y agoI honestly was wondering how services like Clearbit are even legal.
- ashconnor 3y agoCongrats to Alex MacCaw et al.
- tebbers 3y agoHe's a great guy and deserves the success. I reached out to him in 2013ish about US immigration and he was extremely nice and helpful. Check out his new startup, Reflect Notes, seems to be getting some traction.
- ashconnor 3y agoI remember that blog post. Very useful. Not much has changed since unfortunately! https://underdog.io/blog/engineers-guide-to-us-visas https://underdog.io/blog/engineers-guide-to-us-visas
- martinald 3y agoI've always wondered how services like Clearbit work? How do they map IPs to companies? Do their chrome extensions send data back or something? It seems fairly difficult to me especially with CG-NAT growing and growing?