How To Make Money, Using Web Scraping | Intro to Web Scraping

  Welcome friends to my latest article on how to make  money using web scraping. Today I am going to   show you three unique ways to make money using  web scraping. Did you know what your reading   right now is data. It may just seem like a few  words to you but on the back end everything you  read online is data that can be taken, picked  apart, and manipulated with. Simplified this is what a Web Scraper is. They go through the code  that was created to make a website (HTML code) or database and take the data they want. Virtually  any website can be scraped . Some sites do involve measures that stop these scrapers from  taking their data, but if you are good enough you can essentially scrape 99% of websites online. If you didn’t know what a Web Scraper is, well now you have an idea and we can get to  the point of why you are reading this article.  

Money. Web Scraping can be a unique way to make  money that isn’t as difficult as it sounds.  

In fact all the methods and examples I'm going to  show you took less than 50 lines of code to make,   

and can be learned in only a couple of  hours. 

So with that said let me show you. 

3 ways to make Money Using Web Scraping 

1. Creating Bots:                                                                                                                         A bot is just a technical term 

for a program that does a specific action.  Depending what you make this action to be, you can sell it to those who don’t have the  technical abilities to make it themselves. To show how you can create a bot and sell it,  I created an Airbnb bot. This bot allows the  user to input a location and it will return all  the houses that Airbnb offers at that location  including the price, rating, number  of guests allowed, bedrooms, beds, and baths. All of this being done by web scraping  the data of each posting on the Airbnb website. 

To demonstrate the bot in action  I’m going to input a location. 

Lets say I want to search for Airbnb’s in  United State, France. I simply input France into the bot, and it returns 272 unique Airbnb’s within  seconds in an organized excel spreadsheet. It is now much easier to see all the  houses/features and their comparisons to other postings. It is also much easier to filter  through. I live in a family of 4 and if  we were to go to Rome we would look for an  Airbnb with at least 2 beds at a decent price.  

Now with this clean organized spreadsheet,  excel makes it extremely easy to filter to 

match my needs. And out of hundred results 3 or 4 returned with my matching needs. Within these 3or 4 the one I would pick one, that has a very good rating and is cheapest as compared to others. So after I pick the one I want, I would simply copy the link of the  posting into a browser and book it then. 

Looking for places to stay can be an extremely  daunting task when going on vacation, 

I’m sure most of us have felt that at one time or another. Because of this there are those that are willing to pay just to make this process  easier. With this bot I made the process easier. You just saw me book a room with all my  matching needs at a good price within 5 minutes. 

Trust me people are willing to pay to  make their lives just a bit easier. 

2. Reselling:                                                                                     One of the most common uses of web scraping, is getting prices off websites. 

There are those  who create web scraping programs that run everyday 

and return the price of a specific product,  and when the price drops to a certain amount the program will automatically buy the product  before its sold out. Then since the demand for the product will be higher than the supply they resell  the product at a higher price to make a profit. This is just one example of the many  reselling tactics that web scrapers use. 

Another one which I will show  you an example of can save you 

a lot of money and make a lot for you too. Every retail website has limited deals and sales, where they will display the original price and  the sale price. But what they don’t do is show  how much is actually discounted off the original  price. For example if a watch originally costs $350 and the sale price is $300 you would think  $50 off would be a lot of money but it’s actually only a 14.2% discount. Now if a T-shirt originally  costs $50 and the sale price is $40, you might see $10 being not that much off the original price,  but in fact the discount is larger than the watch at 20%. Therefore you can save/make money by  buying the products with the highest discounted %. 

Using Hudson's’ Bay, a department store that  has numerous of sales on all kinds of brands, 

were going to use web scraping to get the  original and sale price of all the products  and find the product with the highest discount. After scraping the website it returned over 900 products and as you can see there  is only 1 product out of the 900 with over a 50% discount. That would be  the Perry Ellis Solid Non-Iron Dress Shirt. This sale price is only a limited time  offer, so the price for this shirt will eventually go back up to around $90. So if I  were to buy it now at $40 than sell it at $30 below its original at $60 when the limited  sale ends, I would still make a profit of $20. 

This is a method where if you find  the right niche to do this is in, 

there is a potential to make  a large amount of money. 

3. Selling Data:                                                                                 There are millions of datasets online 

that are free and accessible to everyone. This  data is often easily gathered and thereby offered to anyone who wants to use them. On the other hand  some data is not as easy to get, and takes either time or a lot of work to put in a nice clean  dataset. This has become the evolution of selling data. There are companies that focus on getting  data that may be hard to obtain and structuring that data into a nice clean spreadsheet or  dashboard that others can use at a certain cost. 

BigDataBall is a sports data website that sells  player logs, play-by-play data, and other stats 

at a price of $30 for a single seasons worth of  data. The reason they can ask for this price is not because there the only ones that have this  data, but there one of the only websites out there that offer this data in a very structured  and clean dashboard that is easy to read. 

Now what I’m going to do is get the  same data as BigDataBall has for free 

and I’m going to put it into a structured  dataset. Like I said before they aren’t the  only ones with this type of data. Basketball-Reference.com has all the same data  but its not structured meaning its data is all  over the place and hard to read, and you simply  cannot just download the dataset you want. This is where web scraping comes in. I’m  going to web scrape the website of all the players logs for each game and put it  into a structured dataset like BigDataBall.After web scraping Basketball-Reference.com we  got over 16000 player logs for the season so far.  

You can see why this data in a nice clean format  can be monetized, because no one in their right 

mind would manually get 16000 logs of data and  put it into their own dataset. But with the help of web scraping we were able to get this data  in a couple of minutes and save ourselves $30. Needless to say though you can do what BigDataBall  does. Find data that is hard to obtain manually, let your computer do the work, and than sell  it to those interested in having that data in a structured dataset. Conclusion 

In the world where everyone wants to make  money Web Scraping has become a very unique 

and new way to make money on the side. Where  if you apply it to the right situations it can make you a ton of money, and it is  easier to do than most people think. 

If you have any questions about the code or in  general, I would prefer if you leave a comment 

below so that I can get back to you. If you want to learn this step by step process to web scrapping ask me in comments. I will give you a link of my video in which you can easily learn how to scrap data in just 5 to 7 minutes.  

Thanks for reading my article, please  comment below how much helpful this article was?