I’ve been thinking a lot about web scraping lately, especially after reflecting on a university project where I scraped car listings from a platform similar to eBay. I gathered detailed information about cars for sale in a specific city, including both car and seller details. At the time, I was just trying to complete the assignment, but now I see how valuable that data could be for someone looking to buy a car.
I learned how to create web scraping scripts in just a couple of hours, and it opened my eyes to the potential of using this skill for a business. I’m curious about how I could leverage web scraping to actually make money, especially since I’m not limited to just one website or niche.
One idea I had was generating leads for real estate properties or scraping LinkedIn for potential business contacts. However, I’m unsure how to find buyers for this data and how to ensure that it’s ethically acceptable, like verifying that they wouldn’t be spam calling people. Scalability is also a big concern for me.
Does anyone have suggestions for viable business ideas that could utilize web scraping? What niches or strategies would you recommend? Any insights or experiences would be greatly appreciated! Thanks
However, you don’t merely “scrape” these websites. When there exist APIs, it would be highly inefficient to design a tool, figure out how to stealthily scrape many recipe sites, make a database for all of this, etc.
Selecting a UI and organizing data are far more difficult than this would be.
Furthermore, a case study typically contains information about real-world action on an issue. You merely have a few links on your page. This isn’t a study of cases.
Business ideas using web scraping include competitive analysis, lead generation, price comparison services, market research, and content aggregation. It can also be used for real estate data collection, job market analysis, and monitoring brand mentions online.
At Dealavo, where I work, we use web scraping to automate and monitor prices. It’s also true that some businesses are astounded by our tool’s ability to save time and provide high-quality data that can now be analyzed in an organized manner when compared to human labor.
Regarding the business, however, it’s not as simple as it first appears. For instance, we have a Quality Assurance team that verifies the quality of matches to ensure that the data is reliable and, consequently, meaningful. In other words, if you truly want to produce a high-quality solution, there is more work involved in that business than it may initially appear.
