Web scraping is indeed a potent tool in our world today. There is an endless ocean of data people are failing to use to their advantage. Data is valuable, and for those that know it’s worth, many opportunities await them.
Without much ado, let’s go ahead and say: everyone can unlock a lot of possibilities from web data and turn it into so many web scraping business ideas. There are literally more than a hundred ways to use scraped data. However, to bring you up to speed with the best business ideas you can implement now, we will be discussing 10 of the best ways you can use data. Let’s go:
1. Sell Web Data
Many businesses need data and find it very hard to obtain them. Therefore, many companies get their data by buying from those who sell. If you can scrape a list of high-quality leads for a company, they will pay you for it.
There is a growing community of freelancers who are into this business venture. It is not too late for you to join them. You can sell product reviews, price history, product ratings, and so on.
2. Build an App
This is one of those web scraping business ideas that seems daunting, especially if you do not know how to code. However, with web scraping, you don’t have to be a code-master to build a web scraping app that works well. All you need is a few weeks to go through all the steps needed to build an app, then you are good to go.
For example, you can easily create a simple investment app that sends your customers email notifications once a stock hits a specific price. Another app idea is to create an app that notifies your users once the prices of certain products drop on any eCommerce website. You would be surprised by the number of people ready to pay a monthly subscription fee for this service.
3. Extract Product Lists from Multiple Retailers
A web scraper can help you get product details as well as pricing from multiple retailers. With this data, you can create a website where you showcase price comparisons. People are always trying to find the best retailers that sell a particular product at the best price. By meeting this need on your website, you can have a website that will drive thousands of traffic every month.
4. Sports Data Services
Sports data service providers are websites that sell sports data like player logs, match history, and sports agencies every sport season. You can create a sport website with that same goal. It’s a large market with little competition.
The reason for this is that sports data is huge. It can be interpreted in several ways by different companies with different goals. For example, sports betting bookmakers use sports data to set betting odds. This should give you an idea of the things possible with this web scraping business idea.
5. Job Aggregators
Job aggregator is a site that compiles job postings from different websites into one searchable online user interface. People go online to search for jobs. If you can scrape job postings from career pages, LinkedIn, and other relevant sources, you should be able to create a job aggregator website that will help jobseekers find a good job.
6. Real Estate Websites
Real estate websites are one of the many web scraping business ideas easy to implement. Property details, agent information, the price of properties, sellers’ profiles are a few among the much information that are searched for online every day. Like a job aggregator, you can scrape real estate data to create a website where you can display real estate information in a neat and understandable format.
7. Automotive Website
Web scraping can also be used to create an automotive website where aggregated car listings are displayed. Scraping car listings would mean setting up web crawlers to scrape specific data from any relevant source, like car companies’ websites and other automotive websites. Having all the information about different cars would help improve your users’ car shopping experience.
8. News Website
Yes! It is possible to create a new website without employing journalists to search for news. Web scraping makes it easy for you to scrape news articles from various news websites with straightforward steps. With the news data you scrape, you can create a website where people will read the news you have.
It would help if you always remembered to make the news on your website unique by rewording the content. Direct copying is bad for your business.
9. Search Engine
Search engines like Google, Bing and Yahoo get almost all their data by scraping millions of public websites. Creating your own industry-specific search engine would be of help to many people. It’s always a hassle to look for specific industry information among the different kinds of information Google usually displays.
If you create a specific search engine, for let’s say lawyers, it will be useful in making their job easier. So many professionals are willing to pay for something like this.
10. Scrape Search Engines for SEO Tracking
SEO companies rely heavily on web scraping. To monitor the competitive position of their customers or their indexing status, web scraping is needed. SEO keyword research tools also use web crawlers to find keywords that will rank their users higher.
To implement this web scraping business idea, you can start by helping your customers monitor their ranking in the SERP. This is just scratching the surface. So much more can be done with web scraping as regards SEO.
Ready to get started? Octoparse – the free web scraping tool you need
We have given you so many web scraping business ideas. The question you mostly have on your mind now is, “where do I start?”. Well, the first step is to get a good web scraping tool. Thankfully, Octoparse stands tall as an excellent choice.
Octoparse is a free and easy-to-use web scraping tool that is more than capable of implementing any of these business ideas. It might take a few simple tutorials to utilize for your desired outcome. However, that’s all it takes to bring these great web scraping business ideas into reality.
