I have been in the web scraping industry since 2014, more or less a geological era ago. The iPhone 6 was just launched, people were throwing ice cubes on their heads, and this picture literally broke the internet.
We started our data company, Re Analytics, that year without knowing anything about web scraping; we learned by doing. Our vision was, and still is that there’s such a vast amount of public data out on the web, and few people understand its potential and use cases. Today, the situation is much better than in 2014; most of the people we talk with at least tried to do some scraping for fun or business needs, but it took ten years for web scraping to become recognized as a common practice.
The company is still in place, even if we’re shifting to the Data Boutique business model: instead of a data company, we’re building a marketplace for web data. Both businesses have pros and cons, but we firmly believe that Data Boutique could have a bigger impact on the industry.
We discussed these business models, the key elements data buyers are looking for, the challenges for sellers, and the advantages of entering a marketplace like Data Boutique.