Web scraping has become an invaluable tool for businesses looking to gain a competitive edge in today‘s data-driven digital landscape. By automatically extracting large amounts of data from websites, web scraping enables companies to make smarter, more informed decisions and unlock new opportunities for growth.
According to a recent survey by Deloitte, 67% of companies are actively investing in web scraping and data extraction technologies to support their business objectives. The global web scraping services market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 12.3% from 2021 to 2028, reaching $3.79 billion by 2028 (Source: Grand View Research).
As a web crawling and data scraping expert with over a decade of experience, I‘ve seen firsthand the incredible potential of web scraping across virtually every industry. In this post, I‘ll share 10 powerful web scraping business ideas that anyone can start today, along with practical tips and real-world examples. Whether you‘re an entrepreneur looking for a new venture or a business owner seeking to expand your current operations, these ideas will inspire you to harness the power of web data.
1. Web Scraping Consulting and Freelancing
- Offer web scraping consulting services to help businesses identify web data opportunities
- Provide end-to-end web scraping solutions, from defining requirements to delivering data
- Specialize in niche industries or types of web data to differentiate your services
- Build a portfolio of successful web scraping projects to attract more clients
- Offer ongoing data collection and monitoring services for recurring revenue
By 2021, the global data consulting market is projected to reach $25 billion, growing at a CAGR of 14.6% from 2016 to 2021 (Source: Markets and Markets). Freelancers can tap into this demand by offering specialized web scraping services. For example, Northwork Studios provides web scraping and data engineering consulting to funded startups and Fortune 500 companies, driving an estimated $350K in annual revenue within three years of launching.
2. Price Monitoring and Market Intelligence
- Scrape competitors‘ websites to track pricing, promotions, and product assortment
- Collect data on market trends, consumer sentiment, and industry news
- Analyze scraped data to inform pricing strategies and stay ahead of market shifts
- Offer competitor price monitoring dashboards and alerts for real-time intelligence
- Sell access to web scraped market datasets to other businesses
Price monitoring and market intelligence platforms like Prisync and DataWeave are powered by web scraping. Prisync‘s pricing plans range from $99 to $2000+ per month based on the number of products and competitor websites tracked. With the global price optimization software market poised to reach $11.1 billion by 2026 (Source: Research and Markets), there is significant growth potential in this space.
3. Lead Generation and Sales Intelligence
- Scrape contact information, job titles, and company data to build targeted lead lists
- Enrich CRM data with additional web scraped firmographic and technographic intel
- Identify buying signals and intent data, such as job postings or website content changes
- Integrate scraped data with sales enablement and automation platforms
- Provide custom lead generation services for B2B companies
The B2B lead generation market is expected to reach $3.6 billion by 2023 (Source: Markets and Markets). Web scraping can help sales and marketing teams uncover high-quality, relevant leads faster. For example, CollectData offers web scraping for sales intelligence, enabling clients to enrich lead data, acquire competitor and industry insights, and identify decision makers, resulting in 20-50% revenue growth.
4. Job Boards and Talent Sourcing
- Aggregate job postings from company websites and other job boards
- Enrich job listings with web scraped company and salary data for job seekers
- Offer recruiters access to search resumes and profiles collected from the web
- Provide job market analytics and compensation benchmarking data
- Build niche job boards for specific industries, skills, or locations
Talent sourcing and acquisition is a $200 billion industry (Source: Training Industry). Web scraping can give job boards and recruiting firms a competitive advantage with more comprehensive, targeted, and fresh candidate data. For example, HireEZ (formerly Hiretual) uses AI and web scraping to help companies identify and engage top talent across 40+ open web platforms, serving over 100,000 recruiters and 700+ enterprises.
5. Social Media Monitoring and Analysis
- Scrape mentions, hashtags, and sentiment about a brand across social platforms
- Collect data on followers, engagement rates, and content performance
- Analyze scraped social data to measure brand health and campaign effectiveness
- Combine social insights with web scraped news and blog content for PR monitoring
- Sell social media monitoring dashboards and reports to clients
The social media analytics market was valued at $3.1 billion in 2020 and is projected to reach $10.5 billion by 2027 (Source: Research and Markets). Tools like Sprout Social and Brandwatch use web scraping to help brands track and analyze their social presence across channels. Sprout Social‘s pricing starts at $99 per user per month, with some customers paying over $10K per month for more advanced features and data.
6. E-commerce Product and Seller Analytics
- Scrape product details, pricing, reviews, and seller rankings from marketplaces
- Monitor MAP violations and identify unauthorized third-party sellers
- Analyze trends in best-selling products, category performance, and pricing
- Build tools for MAP monitoring, seller tracking, and competitive benchmarking
- Provide product research and sourcing services for e-commerce brands
Marketplace sellers and e-commerce managers rely on product and seller data to optimize their strategies. For example, Algopix offers product market research and dynamic pricing insights based on web scraped data from eBay, Amazon, Walmart, and other marketplaces. Plans range from $29.99 to $199.99 per month. With global e-commerce sales projected to reach $6.54 trillion by 2023 (Source: Statista), there is huge potential for scraping-based e-commerce analytics solutions.
7. Alternative Financial Data for Investors
- Scrape web data to generate unique investment signals and insights
- Collect data on ESG factors, such as environmental impact and diversity metrics
- Monitor news sentiment, product reviews, and web traffic for public companies
- Analyze linkages between companies based on shared suppliers, customers, etc.
- Provide alternative datasets and investment analytics platforms
Hedge funds, asset managers, and other investors are increasingly using alternative data to inform investment decisions. In fact, spending on alternative data is expected to reach $1.7 billion by 2020 (Source: Deloitte). Companies like Thinknum and Yipit provide web scraped alternative data to investors. Thinknum‘s datasets, covering over 400 million companies, can sell for over $100K per year per dataset.
8. Real Estate Property Data and Analytics
- Aggregate residential and commercial property listings from multiple sources
- Enhance listing data with additional property details, photos, and owner info
- Monitor price fluctuations, vacancy rates, and other market trends
- Analyze property data to identify investment opportunities and market inefficiencies
- Provide real estate analytics and valuation tools for investors and professionals
In 2020, VTS, a commercial real estate software provider, acquired Property Capsule, a web scraping platform for gathering property data. By integrating web scraped property data into VTS‘ market data offering, the company aims to provide landlords and brokers with more timely and accurate comp information to inform leasing and investment decisions. With the global PropTech market expected to reach $86.5B by 2032 (Source: Future Market Insights), there is strong demand for data-driven real estate software.
9. Web Data Extraction APIs and Datasets
- Build custom web scrapers for hard-to-access websites and databases
- Productize web data collection pipelines into APIs for developers
- Offer pre-collected web datasets for specific use cases, such as training ML models
- Provide data normalization, validation, and enrichment services
- Partner with data marketplaces and integrators to distribute datasets
The data preparation market is expected to grow from $2.9 billion in 2018 to $5.7 billion by 2023 (Source: Markets and Markets). Companies like Scrapy and SerpApi offer web scraping infrastructure and APIs to help businesses and developers collect web data at scale. SerpApi‘s pricing ranges from $50 to $2000+ per month based on monthly search volume and add-ons. As more companies seek to leverage web data for AI/ML and analytics, demand for web data extraction tools and datasets will continue to rise.
10. Content and Trend Analysis for Marketing
- Scrape news articles, blog posts, and social content related to a topic or industry
- Analyze scraped text data to identify trending themes, keywords, and sentiment
- Monitor competitors‘ content marketing strategies and performance metrics
- Provide content optimization recommendations based on data-driven insights
- Offer content marketing analytics dashboards and reports
Over 40% of marketers say content marketing is a very important part of their overall strategy (Source: HubSpot). Web scraping can help marketers craft more targeted, engaging content. For example, BuzzSumo uses web scraping to analyze the social engagement and backlinks of content related to any topic or competitor. By understanding what content performs best, marketers can create more impactful content. BuzzSumo‘s plans range from $99 to $499+ per month, with enterprise plans available for larger teams and data needs.
Getting Started with Your Web Scraping Business
As you can see, there are countless opportunities to build profitable businesses with web scraping. To get started, I recommend:
- Identifying a specific niche or problem you want to solve with web data
- Assessing the feasibility and legality of scraping the required data
- Defining your target customers and their data needs
- Developing a prototype or MVP to validate your idea
- Testing different pricing and business models to optimize for revenue
- Investing in scalable and reliable web scraping infrastructure
- Continuously monitoring and adapting to changes in the market and data landscape
With the right strategy and execution, web scraping can be an incredibly powerful tool for driving business growth and innovation. As a web scraping expert, I‘m excited to see more entrepreneurs and companies leveraging web data to unlock new opportunities and insights. The possibilities are truly endless.
So what are you waiting for? Start turning your web scraping business idea into reality today. The data is out there – it‘s up to you to harness its potential.