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Ask HN: How do you earn a living from scraping in 2018?

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Re: Ask HN: How do you earn a living from scraping in 2018?

#22
post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I give a price prediction for the rent of a house. So the buyer can immediately calculate ROI.

You do? Or the sites you're scraping do?

Pretty simple I scrape renting objects and buying objects and then use xgboost to predict renting prices of an object. Then I apply the prediction to the buying object. Voila. It’s cool because you can see what features drive prices.

Re: Ask HN: How do you earn a living from scraping in 2018?

#23
I can think of a few ways (not sure all within TOS), not sure if helpful but still worth a shot (maybe):

Build a site for people wanting to buy a car and know what's the avg asking price of models with the same characteristics.

For example: say I want to buy a Freelander for max 10K. I'll go and check all freelanders and quickly notice that most in that range are from the year 2010 and 2012. Kilometers differ, guarantees, etc.

For me at least, I go into each and mentally account what's important and compare to decide which ones I'll contact.

I could use a service that would weigh all the variables and basically say to me: these 3 offer the best value for the money and within your price range.

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If you are able to build email lists, I'll just leave this here: you can upload Look A Like Audiences to facebook to advertise to similar people as your email list.

I'm sure you can see the possibilities here. Sorry I don't go into details as I'm mobile.

Re: Ask HN: How do you earn a living from scraping in 2018?

#25
post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You do? Or the sites you're scraping do?

Pretty simple I scrape renting objects and buying objects and then use xgboost to predict renting prices of an object. Then I apply the prediction to the buying object. Voila. It’s cool because you can see what features drive prices.

A pretty cut and dry case of adding value I'd say. This is a very cool thing, thank you for talking about it.

Re: Ask HN: How do you earn a living from scraping in 2018?

#28
I used to do a lot of scraping too, but now most things have a decent api, I rarely need too. I would think that Machine Learning's need for lots of data just creates a larger market for data. Look at releasing an api for all the data you scrape and sell access to that with a focus on ML.

Things I think are worth $$$

Scrape anything difficult to scrape.

Scrape things that change and keep historical data.

Make a generic scraper and generic api.

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