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Ten years of selling web data: a personal perspective

substack.thewebscraping.club

13 points by PigiVinci83 2 years ago · 10 comments

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ipaddr 2 years ago

I am unimpressed with the data being sold. For example $25 for prices from a store over time. I fail to see who this market is for. Who needs the data at this price?

They don't tell you what fields, formats just a general description. Not even how big. Doesn't feel good enough

neilv 2 years ago

This is a sales pitch.

krembo 2 years ago

@all, isn't the idea of scraping and selling data the core business of Google?

danw1979 2 years ago

“acquiring high-quality alternative data, gathered from nontraditional sources” ?

I’m only a few paragraphs into this, but sure sounds like they’ve been flogging other people’s data so far.

I mean, maybe that’s legal in most places if the data was publicly available ?

  • PigiVinci83OP 2 years ago

    Well, alternative data in general is anonymized and absolutely does not contain any personal info (even because PII is useless for hedge funds, they need to see trends not sell something to people).

    • danw1979 2 years ago

      I meant data belonging to other companies really, not individuals.

      • PigiVinci83OP 2 years ago

        Unless it’s proprietary data (or data acquired from third parties and elaborated), the other source is mainly web scraping and this is regulated. You need to have the rights to scrape this data, which it means that it’s public data

mdaniel 2 years ago

this particular substack link didn't paywall me, but someone had already made an archive.ph for it just in case it blocks someone else https://archive.ph/dmej3

mrj 2 years ago

Poor guy (/s) complains it's hard to sell data they gained surreptitiously. I mean, screw him, people like this is why you have to run 10x the hardware to serve the actual customers.

I'm not sure what perspective is gained from this post. He says: it's hard to sell raw data, you actually have to provide some value as a business. Shocking.

Scummy scrapper would much rather get something for nothing.

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