Don’t miss this insightful post by Skift founder Rafat Ali just because it was published on LinkedIn (where Ali has over 13,000 followers). He highlights a group of companies that he thinks illustrate a new business model, one that turns data and data literacy into a revenue stream. Some examples of media entities already leading in this area, according to Ali, include Bloomberg and FiveThirtyEight.

These companies are also riding a few other intersecting megatrends enabled by digital:

— The blurring of personal and professional lives of users, because of ever-accessible digital devices, pervasive connectivity, and always-on social media mean users want more and more information, when they want it, and in more atomized ways than their predecessors.

— Millennials raised on intuitive, open-web services — media among them — demand more from the business information companies they rely on for their professional lives. If everyone’s coming in as an informed user driven by web-research, how should mediata companies service this generation of users?

— The rise of the prosumer, or to use a more lay term, the rise of fanboy. If everyone’s an expert, what does it do the the potential userbase these companies can build? Mediata companies are rethinking the traditional userbase and casting a wider net, and going beyond industry-defined silos, to build a larger brand.

— The traditional silos in almost all industries are collapsing because of digital –media, tech and finance are best examples of it — and that creates opportunities for new ways to look at industries, and build new digital-native information brands.

— The ubiquity of embed code — YouTube’s under-appreciated contribution in making it mainstream — and widgets as a precursor to it means any kind of media, including data and its visualization finally gets unlocked from its proprietary containers, and can freely flow in any kind of environment.

We talked with Ali back in May about how Skift fits into this data-journalism-hybrid model.