Are you searching for how to earn some money with your web scraping skill? You are on the right page. I’ll show you three different ways to make money with Web scraping in this article.
What is Web Scraping
The process of gathering information from a website is “web scraping.” After collecting this data, you will export them into a format that you may find more helpful. No matter if you’re using a spreadsheet or an API.
How Is Web Scraping Done?
There are some websites that can contain a very large amount of information that is of great value.
You name it, and this app has it: stock prices, product information, sports statistics, and contacts for companies.
To access this information, you would have to either use the format that the website uses or manually copy and paste it into a new document. This is where web scraping can be of assistance.
They do this by going through the code of a website (HTML code), and then taking the data that they require from the database. You can scrape the contents of almost any website.
Some websites do employ security measures that prevent scrapers from taking their data, but if you have enough skill, you can scrape virtually all of the websites that are available on the internet.
Method Of Web Scraping
Although manual web scraping is possible, automated tools are generally preferred for the process of scraping data from websites because they are typically less expensive and more productive than their manual counterparts.
However, web scraping is not a simple task the vast majority of the time. Because there are so many different kinds of websites, web scrapers have a wide range of capabilities and features to accommodate them.
Is web scraping legal?
To summarize, the act of scraping content from websites is not against the law. However, there are some guidelines that must be followed. When non-publicly available data are extracted, web scraping crosses the line into illegal territory.
This should not come as a shock considering the proliferation of web scraping and the many recent legal cases that have been related to the practice.
If you were unfamiliar with the term “Web Scraper,” hopefully you have a better understanding of it now, and we can proceed to the main reason you have interest in this article…MONEY.
How To Make Money with Web scraping
Web scraping is a novel method for generating income that is not nearly as challenging as it may initially appear. In point of fact, each of the procedures and examples that I am going to walk you through require fewer than fifty lines of code to create. This you can be master in a matter of just a few hours.
Now, with that out of the way, allow me to demonstrate…
You can make money with Web scraping in three different ways.
1. Making Robots (Bots)
The term “bot” refers to any computer program that is designed to carry out a particular task.
You might be able to sell this action to people who don’t have the technical ability to make it on their own, depending on what it is that you make it into.
I can decide to demonstrate how one can make a bot and then sell it by developing an Airbnb bot or hotel booking bot.
The user is able to input a location into this bot, and it will then return all of the homes that Airbnb has to offer at that location, or the nearest hotels and guest house with available spaces.
Along with information about the price, rating, number of guests allowed, bedrooms, beds, and bathrooms. You can achieve all of this with web scrapping, which collects data from each listing on the Airbnb/hotel websites.
In order to demonstrate how the bot works, I’m going to start by inputting a location. Let’s say I’m interested in staying in an Airbnb in Ontario, which is located in Canada.
Simply entering Ontario into the bot elicits a response of many distinct Airbnbs. The response are then presented to me in an organized excel spreadsheet within seconds.
Reselling
Obtaining pricing information from websites is one of the most common applications of web scraping.
Some people create web scraping programs that run on a daily basis and return the price of a particular product. If the price drops below a certain threshold, the program will automatically purchase the item before it is sold out.
They then resell the product at a higher price in order to make a profit. This is because they anticipate that the demand for the product will be greater than the supply.
Here is just one example of the many different strategies that web scrapers utilize when it comes to reselling their data.
How Do You Do This?
Every online store has time-sensitive deals and sales, and customers can easily compare the item’s original price to its current discount by visiting the website. However, they do not indicate the extent to which the original price has been reduced by the discount.
For instance, if the retail price of a bag was $400 and it is currently on sale for $350, you may believe that you are getting a significant discount because you saved $50; however, this is actually only a 6.67% savings. You may want to know about personal finance here.
If the original price of a dress was $50 and it is now on sale for $40, you might think that $10 is not a significant amount off the original price; however, the discount is actually larger than that of the bag, coming in at 20%.
Therefore, you can either save money or make money by purchasing the items that have the highest percentage discount.
The sale price is usually lasts for a short period. When the price goes back to the original price, you then sell your items and make more money.
Learn about more business ideas here.
3. Selling Data
There are millions of datasets that are available for no cost which anyone can access online. These data can typically be gathered quickly and easily, and as a result, they are made available to anyone who would like to use them.
On the other hand, there is some data that is more difficult to obtain, and it either requires a lot of time or a lot of effort to incorporate it into a nice clean dataset.
The practice of selling data is developing into this more recent form. There are businesses that specialize in acquiring data that may be difficult to acquire. They organizing that data into a spreadsheet or dashboard that other people can use for a fee.
See other ways to make money with soft skills here.
Applying the different ways of making money from web scraping will help you earn a good sum of money. At this point, you may want to put the extra income into a good use by investing wisely. Read more on the best ways to invest money here.