[HN Gopher] HubSpot Acquires Clearbit
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HubSpot Acquires Clearbit
Author : jcolman
Score : 125 points
Date : 2023-11-01 13:10 UTC (9 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.hubspot.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.hubspot.com)
| xnx wrote:
| Is 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 wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Yes.
| yodon wrote:
| >Yes
|
| Citation? Or just an assumption?
| hilbertseries wrote:
| I 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 wrote:
| Right. Meta and Google are much less shady about this.
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Not 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 wrote:
| Be 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 wrote:
| > _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.
| lancesells wrote:
| Outside of using a Meta product or a Google product it's
| all completely shady. I shouldn't be tracked going to the
| DMV website or purchasing something online or using a
| dating app or going into a store or...
| bennyelv wrote:
| In the context of a business email address GDPR is far less
| restrictive. See GDPR Recital 47 (7): 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 wrote:
| One 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 wrote:
| Except 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 wrote:
| > produce tables of pre-hashed emails
|
| Wouldn't this require knowledge of the email beforehand?
| mgillett54 wrote:
| I 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
| jgraettinger1 wrote:
| They'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).
| ethbr1 wrote:
| Which makes perfect sense, because why would anyone sell
| their golden goose, if they had any other possible way of
| monetizing it?
| CaveTech wrote:
| I think this is generally false in most instances. All
| advertising pixels use unsalted sha1 hashes over https.
| oooyay wrote:
| Things like homomorphic encryption making secure sharing
| possible without the security being lip service.
| moron4hire wrote:
| This is one of the things that drives me nuts when hardcore
| privacy advocates start wading into browser feature
| discussions and complaining about things being used to
| fingerprint users.
|
| I mean, can eye-tracking in a WebXR session be used to
| identify users? Yes, clearly that is a possibility. But
| will the addition of eye-tracking increase the
| identifiability of users? No, not in the least, because
| users are already identifiable by means that involve core
| browser features.
|
| But frequently, the "privacy advocates" win and we're left
| with a web platform that has a lot of weird, missing
| functionally in comparison to native apps, pushing
| developers to either compromise on functionality or develop
| a native app. Compromising is bad for users. And developing
| a native app could can be bad for the developer, if one
| considers their existing investment in web technologies. Or
| both the developer and users, when one considers the vig
| that app stores charge, or the editorial control that app
| stores enforce over socially-controversial-yet-not-
| actually-illegal topics. Or just users when one considers
| the fact that the app stores just hand app developers a
| user identity without even making them work for it with
| fingerprinting.
|
| And often, the voices that are loudest in defence of
| "privacy" are browser developers that also just so happen
| to be employed by said app store vendors.
| herval wrote:
| it feels to me that to date, selling people's information
| remains as the only viable large business model of the
| internet, after ecommerce
| jahewson wrote:
| No, 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 wrote:
| It'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 wrote:
| There 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 wrote:
| I'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 wrote:
| You'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.
| biggestdummy wrote:
| From first-hand experience, B2B sellers do not get this
| information today. They typically get "signals" like
| "Company X is searching for product category Y" or "Company
| X is visiting your web site". And "Company X's CIO is John
| Smith - here's his phone number". But nobody that I've seen
| claims to offer individual names of web site visitors.
| xnx wrote:
| Services like retention.com provide email addresses for
| otherwise anonymous site visitors based on information
| provided to them by their "publisher network".
| mritchie712 wrote:
| Curious 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 wrote:
| You pay for the convenience.
| andygcook wrote:
| Curious 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 wrote:
| Hubspot 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).
| maxmorlocke wrote:
| ZoomInfo 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 wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| The 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.
| strombofulous wrote:
| Unfortunately, there aren't enough beaches to go around, so
| we will still have to pick winners and losers
| zoogeny wrote:
| > 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 wrote:
| That's what the Vision Pro is for.
| Eumenes wrote:
| > A.I. powered
|
| > personal messages
| omneity wrote:
| Read customized at scale to elicit familiar responses from
| the recipients. So Gibson-esque.
| RamblingCTO wrote:
| Am I the only one that feels disgusted by this?
|
| This also smells very illegal in the EU without consent.
| thiago_fm wrote:
| Clearbit'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 :-)
| fooster wrote:
| > just got the old CEO back as far as I can remember
|
| hum? The original CEO is developing https://reflect.app/
| baetylus wrote:
| Love that landing page.
| tacone wrote:
| Interesting, it does not look to be ready to be used on
| mobile though.
| kwerk wrote:
| one of the co-founders (former CMO > COO > interim CEO) Matt
| Sornson came back to be CEO.
| thiago_fm wrote:
| ^ that, my mistake.
| warthog wrote:
| Wonder what the prices on the transaction was?
| nikolay wrote:
| I honestly was wondering how services like Clearbit are even
| legal.
| bennyelv wrote:
| It's because it's about companies rather than private
| individuals.
|
| Clearbit (nor my company) don't do anything B2C.
| ashconnor wrote:
| Congrats to Alex MacCaw et al.
| tebbers wrote:
| He'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 wrote:
| I remember that blog post. Very useful. Not much has changed
| since unfortunately!
|
| https://underdog.io/blog/engineers-guide-to-us-visas
| martinald wrote:
| I'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?
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