Not broadly true in my opinion. To give an example from the financial services industry:

* Satellite provider or analytics firm sells "car counts" for retail stores

* Financial institution is intrigued; this must correlate with sales, right?

* But..why don't we just buy credit card transaction data and foot traffic data from clearing houses and GPS trace providers?

I often liken satellite imagery to salt. It's great to finish a dish, but should never be consumed alone. If you don't believe the foot traffic data or credit card transaction data you're buying, you can use satellite data to check it or refine the model. But that's a niche within a niche.

The other issue I pointed out in that article is customer savvy--if you're a quant fund sophisticated enough to make use of an arcane data feed, you're very likely sophisticated enough to generate that feed yourself from raw data. And if you do it yourself, it's suddenly part of a "proprietary" solution. So you'd rather just buy images and do the heavy lifting that pay a premium to buy a data feed that doesn't quite solve your problem by itself.

I think this applies to a lot of types of data. Selling "insights" is really just selling a filtered version of the raw data. If the client's needs match up with your filters, then you've saved them a lot of work. However, if the filters don't match up perfectly with the client's needs then they'll need to do filtering and processing themselves. And in that case, they'll likely get better results just working with the raw data, instead of whatever data you think they need.

I suspect it is at least approximately true of all data sets that are both broadly applicable and difficult to acquire (i.e. requires domain expertise to acquire).