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.
Comment on Chad scraper
madcaesar@lemmy.world 1 year ago
How exactly do you make money scraping?
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.
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.
Sotuanduso@lemm.ee 1 year ago
By getting someone to hire you to do it.
anteaters@feddit.de 1 year ago
Mind blowing stuff
madcaesar@lemmy.world 1 year ago
No I mean more what is the use case where it would be worth scrapping on a massive scale?
oatscoop@midwest.social 1 year ago
When the data is on multiple sites or sources.
API licenses can be expensive, and some sources might not even have an API.
madcaesar@lemmy.world 1 year ago
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?