You have probably just discovered web scraping and you can’t wait to get your hands working on your first data scraping project. No matter how creative you are, sometimes, it can be so hard to get your creative juices going and you have to crack your head for long before you even come up with an idea for your first scrape project.

Web scraping is here to stay and a lot of people will make money for it either using it to grow their business or selling it as a service. So, in this post, we have put together 5 hot web scraping ideas to kick start your first project.

5 Hot Data Scraping Ideas

Scraping websites is now trending and a lot of people are looking to get the most out of it. What can you do if you know how to scrape a website? No knowledge is lost, so here is how to put that skill to good use.

  • Build an investment app without coding

Building an investment app may sound a bit intimidating to you. However, doing this is easier than you can imagine. The goal of the app you are to build is to set up your scraper to scrape some specific stocks from Yahoo Finance every day. This will be sent into a Google spread sheet and the moment a stock drops under a specific price, you will get a “buy” notification in your email.

  • Help Someone Scrape a Leads Database (or sell it!)

You might have a friend or a family member who has a business. Why not help this person by building a database of leads for the business?

You would start by asking them about the details of their business and also tell them to tell you the kind of leads they would find valuable. When you get the details, you can now set up your scraper and scrape leads data online to build your database.

You can also sell the leads database if you do not know anybody who might need it.

  • Use data scraping for price comparison

A lot of people like to start web scraping with scraping e-commerce websites for product data and comparing prices. Although this is a good place to get started on web scraping, it is good to take it to the next level and analyze the target data from your scrape to look for the best purchase in a given category.

For instance, you can scrape data about all the smartphones available on eBay and analyze the dataset to find out the best bang for your buck when you are comparing both pricing and review score data. To make the data analysis more detailed, filter out any item that has a low amount of reviews.

  • Scrape a Subreddit to browse popular words or topics

You may want to find out if there are certain topics or words that get more upvotes or topics that attract more comments and create the highest discussions. What do you do if you find yourself wondering? You scrape this subreddit and create graphs like word-clouds to present the insights that you find.

You can take these graphs and insights from your project and share them with the subreddit for more conversations.

  • Work as a web scraper

You can actually get a web scraping job on freelance platforms such as Fiverr and Upwork.

Thousands of web scraping jobs get posted on freelance platforms every day. You can get started with this. You can simply search for “web scraping” or “data scraping” jobs on these platforms and apply them. If you know how to scrape websites, make something out of it!