A data marketplace is a platform where organisations that hold data list it for others to find, license and use. The marketplace exists to remove the friction that used to surround every data deal: separate contracts, file transfers over SFTP, manual loading and invoices chased one by one.

In advertising, the term is used in two ways. The broad sense, which this article covers, refers to general-purpose venues such as Snowflake Marketplace, AWS Data Exchange, Databricks Marketplace and Google's BigQuery sharing, where marketing data is one category among many. The narrower sense refers to catalogues of targetable segments inside ad buying tools, which PPC Land has covered separately as the audience marketplace. LiveRamp sits across both: it calls its segment business the Data Marketplace.

How a data marketplace works

Every marketplace has three roles. A provider publishes a listing. A consumer browses, requests access and accepts terms. An operator runs the catalogue, enforces policies and, in most cases, collects payment. Google's BigQuery sharing, formerly Analytics Hub, adds an exchange administrator who decides which publishers and subscribers may join.

A listing typically carries a description, a data dictionary, sample rows, refresh frequency, geographic coverage, pricing and licence terms. Listings can be public, private (visible only to named accounts) or available on request, where the provider approves each subscriber. AWS Data Exchange, for example, lets providers issue private products that never appear in the public catalogue, set subscription terms between one and 36 months, and verify subscribers before granting access, according to AWS.

Delivery is where marketplaces differ most.

Copy-based delivery. AWS Data Exchange, launched on November 13, 2019, was built around files. Subscribers export a provider's data into Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3), and new revisions trigger notifications so pipelines can pick them up automatically, according to Amazon's launch announcement.

Zero-copy sharing. Snowflake, Google and Databricks share data in place. The provider's tables stay in the provider's account; the consumer receives a read-only pointer. Google describes the result as a "linked dataset" that is "not a copy of the data" and stays in sync with the source. Snowflake's annual report for the year ended January 31, 2026 says sharing within a region happens through access control rather than data movement, so consumers see updates without latency and pay nothing to move or transform the data.

Open protocols. Databricks built its marketplace on Delta Sharing, an open protocol it unveiled on May 26, 2021. Recipients do not need to be Databricks customers; shared tables can be read from pandas, Apache Spark or Power BI, according to Databricks documentation. In June 2026 the protocol was renamed OpenSharing and placed under the Linux Foundation, extended to AI models, agent skills and unstructured files.

Controls travel with the share. BigQuery publishers can block copying, exporting and snapshotting of a listing, so a subscriber can query the data but not take it away.

A worked example from advertising

LG Ad Solutions offers a practical illustration. On October 22, 2025, the company began delivering its automatic content recognition (ACR) data through Databricks Marketplace in the United States. ACR is the technology in smart televisions that identifies what is on screen. The Program Views dataset covers more than 33 million opted-in LG televisions, records second-by-second viewing across all 210 US designated market areas and refreshes monthly. A sample is available for evaluation; full access requires a contract negotiated with LG.

That split is common: many listings are shop windows, with terms in a bilateral agreement and the platform supplying the pipe.

Pricing and money flows

Pricing ranges from free listings and flat subscriptions to usage-based charges and custom private offers. Snowflake added usage-based and query-based purchase options in June 2021. Databricks lets customers apply part of their committed platform spend to third-party products: up to 10% of commits, according to its documentation.

Scale figures are almost entirely company-reported. Snowflake said on June 30, 2026 that marketplace providers had earned more than $100 million in gross bookings between January 1 and June 16, 2026, up 277% year on year. That figure is money paid by consumers to providers, not Snowflake's own revenue. Snowflake also said more than 42% of its customers had at least one "stable edge", its term for an ongoing data-sharing relationship. AWS says its catalogue holds more than 3,500 third-party datasets.

The advertising-specific numbers are clearer because LiveRamp is a listed company. Its Data Marketplace generated $35 million in the quarter ended June 30, 2025, up 9%. A year later, for the quarter ended June 30, 2026, it produced $40 million, up 13%, out of total revenue of $214 million, according to LiveRamp's August 5, 2026 results.

Origin and evolution

Microsoft launched Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket in October 2010 as an "app store" for data, according to ADTmag. It did not last. Microsoft told publishers in November 2016 that it was retiring DataMarket because it was "not seeing the sustained customer interest", and stopped taking orders on March 31, 2017.

The second wave arrived with cloud data warehouses. Snowflake announced its Data Exchange on June 4, 2019, with Weather Source among the first providers. Acxiom made its aggregated marketing data available on AWS Data Exchange in December 2019. AWS launched with more than 80 providers and more than 1,000 data products.

Snowflake declared its Data Marketplace generally available on June 8, 2021, with about 160 providers. Google's Analytics Hub reached general availability on November 30, 2022. Databricks announced its marketplace on June 28, 2022 and made it generally available on June 28, 2023, adding providers including Experian, LiveRamp and S&P Global.

The third shift is towards AI. Marketplaces now list models, applications and agents alongside tables. Snowflake's Native Application Framework, announced on June 14, 2022, let developers sell apps that run inside a buyer's account. Databricks listings can include MCP (Model Context Protocol) servers, which expose tools to AI agents. LiveRamp extended its Data Marketplace on January 6, 2026 to license training datasets and partner models.

Why it matters for marketers

Marketing data increasingly lives in a company's own warehouse rather than in a vendor's tool. A marketplace that delivers into that warehouse lets an advertiser enrich customer records, build segments or calibrate measurement without shipping its own data out. The Trade Desk released its European Unified ID on Snowflake Marketplace in May 2025, according to a Business Wire release, so brands could map their first-party records to the identifier inside their own environment.

Proximity also explains the overlap with clean rooms. Snowflake bought Samooha in December 2023, and AWS, Databricks and Google all run clean room products next to their marketplaces, as PPC Land's clean room explainer documents. The marketplace is where parties find one another; the clean room is where restricted joins happen.

Limitations and criticisms

Lock-in was the earliest objection. "The problem with Snowflake is everybody has to buy Snowflake for [its marketplace] to work," Ali Ghodsi, chief executive of Databricks, told The Register in June 2021. Open protocols blunt the point, but a provider on four marketplaces still maintains four integrations.

Opacity of price and quality persists. Many listings show no price and require negotiation, and sample data does not reveal how a dataset was collected or whether consent covers a buyer's intended use. Operators review listings against policy; they do not audit provenance.

Regulation constrains what can be listed and who can buy. The US Department of Justice rule on bulk sensitive personal data, effective April 8, 2025, prohibits US persons from knowingly engaging in data brokerage with China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, Cuba and Venezuela or their covered persons, according to Jones Day; a self-service catalogue must screen buyers accordingly. In the European Union, the Data Governance Act, Regulation (EU) 2022/868, has applied since September 24, 2023. Neutral intermediaries that connect data holders and users must notify a national authority and may not use the data for other purposes, according to the law firm Eubelius.

Neutrality has become a commercial worry in advertising. Publicis Groupe agreed on May 17, 2026 to buy LiveRamp for $2.5 billion in equity value, prompting questions about whether a holding company can run neutral data infrastructure used by its competitors. As of LiveRamp's August 5, 2026 results, the deal was expected to close before the end of 2026.

Not the same as

Audience marketplace. A catalogue of pre-built targeting segments inside a demand-side platform (DSP), priced per thousand impressions or as a share of media. Its products are segments activated in auctions, not datasets queried in a warehouse. PPC Land's audience marketplace explainer covers it.

Data clean room. A governed environment where two parties analyse combined data under agreed rules without seeing each other's raw records. A marketplace sells or grants access; a clean room restricts what can be computed.

Data broker. A company that collects and sells personal information about people it has no direct relationship with. Brokers are frequent providers on marketplaces, but the marketplace is the venue, not the seller.

Data management platform (DMP). Software that collects and organises audience data, mostly cookie-based, for ad targeting. Several DMPs hosted marketplace modules, but the DMP is the warehouse and the marketplace is the shop.

Recent developments

The past year has pushed data marketplaces towards AI. The Trade Desk overhauled its own third-party data marketplace on September 29, 2025 with Audience Unlimited, citing data costs near 20% of media spend. Microsoft introduced a Publisher Content Marketplace on February 3, 2026, co-designed with publishers including the Associated Press, Condé Nast and Vox Media, who set the terms on which AI products may use their content for grounding. Databricks renamed Delta Sharing to OpenSharing in June 2026 and listed The Trade Desk among Delta Sharing users. Snowflake's partner bookings, up 277% in the first half of 2026, suggest buyers are paying; whether that demand is durable has not yet been tested by a downturn.

Timeline

  • October 2010 - Microsoft launches Windows Azure Marketplace DataMarket.
  • November 18, 2016 - Microsoft announces DataMarket's retirement, citing a lack of sustained customer interest.
  • March 31, 2017 - DataMarket stops accepting orders.
  • June 4, 2019 - Snowflake announces the Snowflake Data Exchange.
  • November 13, 2019 - AWS launches AWS Data Exchange with more than 80 providers and 1,000 data products.
  • December 2019 - Acxiom makes its aggregated data available on AWS Data Exchange.
  • May 26, 2021 - Databricks unveils the Delta Sharing open protocol.
  • June 8, 2021 - Snowflake Data Marketplace reaches general availability with about 160 providers.
  • June 14, 2022 - Snowflake announces its Native Application Framework for apps sold through Snowflake Marketplace.
  • June 28, 2022 - Databricks announces Databricks Marketplace and Cleanrooms.
  • November 30, 2022 - Google's Analytics Hub, now BigQuery sharing, reaches general availability.
  • June 28, 2023 - Databricks Marketplace reaches general availability.
  • September 24, 2023 - EU Data Governance Act rules on data intermediation services apply.
  • April 8, 2025 - US Department of Justice bulk sensitive data rule takes effect.
  • May 2025 - The Trade Desk releases European Unified ID on Snowflake Marketplace.
  • September 29, 2025 - The Trade Desk announces Audience Unlimited.
  • October 22, 2025 - LG Ad Solutions delivers ACR data through Databricks Marketplace.
  • January 6, 2026 - LiveRamp extends its Data Marketplace to AI training data and models.
  • February 3, 2026 - Microsoft introduces the Publisher Content Marketplace.
  • May 17, 2026 - Publicis Groupe agrees to acquire LiveRamp.
  • June 2026 - Databricks renames Delta Sharing to OpenSharing under the Linux Foundation.
  • June 30, 2026 - Snowflake reports more than $100 million in marketplace partner bookings for 2026 to June 16.
  • August 5, 2026 - LiveRamp reports Data Marketplace revenue of $40 million for the quarter ended June 30, 2026.

Summary

Who. Providers such as Acxiom, Dun & Bradstreet, LG Ad Solutions and Experian list data; operators include Snowflake, Amazon Web Services, Databricks, Google and, in advertising, LiveRamp; consumers range from analysts and data scientists to marketers and AI developers. Regulators in the United States and the European Union set limits on who may trade what.

What. A data marketplace is a catalogue where datasets, models and data applications are listed, licensed and delivered, with discovery, terms and often billing handled by the operator. Cloud versions increasingly share data in place rather than copying it.

When. Early attempts such as Microsoft's DataMarket ran from 2010 to 2017. Cloud marketplaces arrived from 2019, reached general availability between 2021 and 2023, and from 2025 began listing AI models, agents and training data.

Where. Inside cloud data platforms, delivered into the buyer's own warehouse or storage, and in advertising inside identity and data-collaboration platforms that connect to DSPs and publishers.

Why. Data holders want to sell without negotiating and integrating with every buyer, and buyers want outside data next to their own. The marketplace reduces that friction, while leaving open questions about provenance, lock-in, pricing transparency and regulatory exposure.