Is web scraping profitable?

We have a scraper written by me that we use to collect data off a single website.

I was surprised when were recently asked if we could make the code more efficient. The user pointed out that we are collecting data as fast as possible and that scraping too much would have no added value for him or her (ie, would have only negative consequences). Of course, it's not easy to define a threshold of when to stop, but, what's wrong with asking for information?

Is it still possible to scrape a website and make it profitable? How should one assess the profitability of web scraping? Does it depend on the time frame? The target domain? As always, I am interested in your suggestions and ideas for my next blog post! Share this: Related. About the author. I am a Ph. Student and a researcher in IT operations at University Libre de Bruxelles. I am a fan of Open Source, agile development, the Internet of Things, and data warehousing. I like to develop software to help people in need, improve people's skills and share useful knowledge with the community. I write a blog about data warehousing. You can also find me at GitHub, StackOverflow, LinkedIn and Twitter.

15 Responses. Thanks for the good analysis and question. If you read my first comment, I am well aware that the answer is it depends.

I started with scraping for fun and then decided it was too lucrative. Now, I scrape to make money. However, my approach is based on two principles.

Firstly, I don't try to copy any existing service and create a new one that is different from what already exists. This forces me to find new ways to serve my users/clients and improve the way the data is processed.

Secondly, I keep it simple and don't spend time on unnecessary features. My goal is to extract as much value as possible from the data, focusing on what a user actually needs, not on what the developer likes. For example, I do not need to crawl the entire Web site to extract a page with the main content and a few links. If that is the type of site I have to process, I could simply go directly to the pages that contain my data.

Can you get a job with web scraping?

I just read an article on web scraping and thought I'd share it.

A little background: I've been working as a software engineer for about 5 years now, and I've used many different languages. I've also worked in a couple of web shops as a software developer, but never really focused on web scraping or scraping in general.

In the last 6 months I've had a couple of projects where I had to scrape a website and I didn't know what to do. I was looking for ways to do this, but the information I found was always a bit old, and not very detailed.

So I decided to write this article to help people out. What is web scraping? Web scraping is basically taking data from web pages and then using it. It's usually done by extracting information from the page and then using it to build something else.

When you think about web scraping, think about how a search engine works. A search engine doesn't just go to Google.com and search for something. It first looks at what it knows about the domain, it searches through different engines, it looks at the meta data, it searches through the pages, it uses the results of the page it's already on to look for other things.

In web scraping, it's the same thing. A web scraper looks at what it knows about the domain and then it goes through the different pages it knows about and then it looks for the information it's looking for.

So for example, let's say I wanted to look at the price of a plane ticket. I don't know any websites that sell plane tickets. So my first step is to go to Google.com and type in plane tickets.

The first site that comes up is. This site has a lot of different pages. Let's start with the main page that says Search flights.

Now, what happens if I want to buy a ticket to London? I'll open the site and click on the Search flights button.

Is web scraping good for freelancing?

How much money should I make?

In the last couple of years, web scraping has become a bit of a popular profession. What were previously considered niche jobs are quickly gaining steam. People want to start web scraping and make money without having to leave their desk. They see a post online about freelancing web scrapers, do a little research, and get their feet wet. In a hurry, they jump right in and start scraping all the sites that interest them at once. Within a few months, they've made some money and they may start to think this is what freelancing is all about. Then it hits them: where does the time come from? They can't just scrape away all day. Maybe there is more money in building apps or finding new clients. But how can one be a proper freelancer and still work on web scraping projects at the same time? The goal is for a web scraper to have enough money after working a couple of hours a week.

A newbie might get upset or confused because of the above problem. In order to save time and find out how much money you need to make to cover the overhead cost, we collected some data. At this income level, the scraper would make enough money to cover the cost of an apartment in San Francisco and still have some leftover for his food budget. Another thing to consider is the tax bracket. Depending on where your employer is located, there could be a tax withholding tax. For example, if you are a freelancer living in a lower tax bracket country, this would amount to an additional amount deducted from your hourly rate, which makes scraping less profitable.

Before you decide to start your freelancing career, you have to find the optimal balance between work and leisure. And there's more to that whole thing.

Web scraping is not a hobby. People often start a new business to escape the monotony of daily work or to earn a side income.