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Out of curiosity, why are there so many people crawling sites for prices like what you're talking about? All of the freelance sites are... well, crawling with
by Laaw 11y ago
Out of curiosity, why are there so many people crawling sites for prices like what you're talking about?
All of the freelance sites are... well, crawling with jobs involving web scrapers. What's the business here that I'm missing?
- matt_wulfeck 11y agoIf you can manage to slide -- even just a tiny bit -- between consumers and Ecom sites you can make a lot of money from referrals! This is what slickeals and camelcamelcamel do, though only one of those uses scrapers.
- bduerst 11y agoEconomically speaking, it's taking advantage of imperfect markets, where even in this age of internet search information still doesn't flow perfectly from seller to buyer. Throw in affiliate and referral incentives, and you've created an information market.
- tegansnyder 11y agoI'm not crawling for price. Knowing where our products are being sold online is important to understand the landscape for a large manufacture. Understanding opportunities to develop sales relationships we may or may not have directly, and knowing category expansion opportunity is also important.
- nailer 11y agoAffiliate marketing, price arbitrage, integrating with things that don't have APIs or have very poor APIS.