How to earn money with web scraping in 2024
Web Scraping has opened new gates for passive as well as active incomes. In this post, we will understand how web scraping can be used as a side or your main business source to earn money in 2024.
Today data is priceless as with it you can do wonders in your business. You need data everywhere whether it is decision-making, competitive advantage or stock trading, or financial estimates.
Web Scraping has opened new gates for passive as well as active incomes. Further in this post, we will understand how web scraping can be used as a side or your main business source to earn money in 2024. Also, if you are new to web scraping, you can find more tips and tutorials on web scraping on the Web Scraping Blog.
We will learn about five basic ways by which you can make money by creating a scraper.
Travel Price Monitor
In this sector, you can create a web crawler that can scrape hotel pricing from multiple OTAs like booking.com, Expedia, Hotels.com, etc.
This will help your hotel booking website to keep track of your niche market. You can ultimately adjust your own prices and then increase more bookings. When a visitor will see that you offer a much lower price then this will boost your overall revenue.
You can either create an API for this or you can store the data in a database. If you store this data then you can even sell this data to businesses that require historical hotel rates.
Historical rates are used for analyzing future trends and according to which the travel industry generates offers on hotels and flights.
Using web scraping services or proxies you can create a seamless data pipeline that can serve your data needs on demand without any blockage. You can take advantage of headers too while scraping the web. It helps you to not get caught while crawling over any website.
Lead Generation
The second best way of earning a few bucks using web scraping is by selling targeted leads. Many corporate companies and enterprise businesses around the world need customers. And generally, these companies outsource their lead generation work to freelancers so that their primary focus is on business only. They pay thousands of dollars for this job because it helps them to increase their revenue as well.
Freelancers can scrape websites like Yellowpages, Yelp, etc to extract targeted leads with their names, phone numbers, and emails.
Then the marketing team can contact them to verify if the lead is interested or not. If they are interested then you can send this to the contract company that paid you to collect leads.
You can even create a SAAS tool that can help companies to generate leads. You can sell email lists with emails of decision-makers of the company. You can take input as the URL of the website and then you can display all the employees of the company with their emails. Obviously, this needs a large amount of scraping and with time this database will always grow.
Investment Channel App
This idea might be a little intimidating but using web scraping for stock trading can be very profitable. You can create a simple app that sends you a notification via email or a message if a stock hits your target price. Not just that you can mail yourself all the news associated with a company you have invested in so that if a company is not in a good shape you can always take appropriate decisions at the right time.
For this, you will have to scrape google regularly and then you will have to send yourself a mail before the market bell rings. You can even predict market trends with that data using multiple AI models available in the market.
Companies like Berkshire Hathaway, AXA, etc use this technique to predict market behavior.
Market Opportunities
Using web scraping for market research can analyze which market has what kind of gap. Using that data you can either help a company or maybe you can use it for your own good. Lets us understand this with two simple real-life scenarios.
- For example, a seller is selling bicycles on amazon ranging from $500 to $1000 and it gets tons of reviews but the review ratings are from 1 to 3 out of 5. That means there is a huge market gap that can be filled with a better product.
- Another example could be product placement inside a supermarket. You have to declutter the right placement of the right product by web crawling data of multiple supermarkets around the world. Then you sell this to supermarkets so that they can boost revenue.
Web Scraping Gigs
Why not consider taking web scraping jobs available on multiple platforms like Fiverr, Upwork, etc? You can find tons of work on these websites. Obviously, we have not discovered all the ways you can earn money with web scraping but since oil has various applications, web scraping does too.
Many corporate companies can approach you for various types of jobs that require web scraping. So, yes it would be great to signup on these websites. And the bonus of signing up on these websites is that you don’t have to invest in any kind of infrastructure to generate customers.