Why Top Performers Earn 11% of Revenue from Data — and Most Companies Earn None
McKinsey's research is unambiguous: top-performing organizations now attribute 11% of their revenue to data monetization — five times more than their lower-performing peers. Roughly 40% of business leaders plan to launch data, analytics, or AI businesses in the next five years, the highest of any new-business category. And yet Forrester estimates that 60-73% of all enterprise data still goes unused for analytics. The gap isn't ambition. It isn't infrastructure. It's the four-to-six months of strategy, pricing, ICP, GTM, and competitive work between 'we have valuable data' and 'a buyer is paying us for it.' This is what most data monetization efforts get wrong — and the new on-ramp that compresses the timeline from months to days.