1y ago

Chad scraper

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How exactly do you make money scraping?
- By getting someone to hire you to do it.
  
  Mind blowing stuff
  
  No I mean more what is the use case where it would be worth scrapping on a massive scale?
  
  When the data is on multiple sites or sources.
  API licenses can be expensive, and some sources might not even have an API.
  
  I get the concept but a concrete example. What company could possibly want to pay for scraping a site?
  Some dude as a hobby I get it, but what, like Amazon will pay some guy to scrape competition prices or something?
  
  I can't imagine data scraping is something companies will quickly admit to, considering the legal issues involved. It was also the norm for a long time -- APIs for accessing user generated data is a relatively new thing.
  As for a concrete example: companies using chatGPT. A lot of useful data comes from scraping sites that don't offer an API.
  
  Maybe you've got a small company involved in toy buying and reselling, and they want to scrape toy postings from ebay etc. so that they can scroll through a database of different postings and sort it by price or estimated profit or whatever.
- Imagine an investment firm looking at a property market. They need data like price trends in the surrounding area.
  Real estate API is expensive, scraping is free. By hiring an employee the can save money.
- There's a ton of money to be made from scraping, consolidating, and organizing publicly accessible data. A company I worked for did it with health insurance policy data because every insurance company has a different website with a different data format and data that updates every day. People will pay da big bux for someone to wrap all that messiness into a neat, consistent package. Many sites even gave us explicit permission to scrape because they didn't want to set up an api or find some way to send us files.
  Right now, gathering machine learning data is hot, cause you need a lot of it to train a model. Companies may specialize in getting, say, social media posts from all kinds of sites and putting them together in a consistent format.
- Most clear example is these apps that get you the best deals on hotels or flights, they compare prices by web scrapping. Obviously they take a cut in these transactions.

97 comments