There has been much excitement about the recent launch of the Salesforce Data Studio, a new data-sharing platform within the Salesforce Marketing Cloud.

The idea of the Data Studio is simple: marketers can, on a fully automated basis, identify, order and integrate datasets that others are offering for sale. In its early implementation, the Data Studio seems mostly like a cool way for marketers to buy email lists. But the vision is much bigger and more interesting: to allow marketers to augment and overlay existing email lists with more data so that they become smarter about their lists, target their efforts more effectively, and get better results.

Data Studio at time of launch is heavy on audience data, mostly from larger publishers, but there’s no reason any data publisher couldn’t participate as well, especially if the Data Studio wants to exploit its full potential.

Interestingly, Salesforce is not the only big player that has an interest in data marketplaces. The Amazon Web Services Marketplace sells software through its marketplace – again, a totally automated buying experience – but it also offers a selection of public domain datasets for free. It’s a small jump then for Amazon to start selling databases on behalf of others.

As you can see, neither of these two marketplaces is quite ready for prime time as far as becoming a meaningful sales channel for data publishers, but they’re tantalizingly close. Keep an eye on these marketplaces: they could become very important to data publishers very quickly.