4 ms·

Ten years of selling web data: a personal perspective

13 points by PigiVinci83 3y ago

danw1979 3y ago
“acquiring high-quality alternative data, gathered from nontraditional sources” ? I’m only a few paragraphs into this, but sure sounds like they’ve been flogging other people’s data so far. I mean, maybe that’s legal in most places if the data was publicly available ?
- PigiVinci83 3y ago
  Well, alternative data in general is anonymized and absolutely does not contain any personal info (even because PII is useless for hedge funds, they need to see trends not sell something to people).
  - danw1979 3y ago
    I meant data belonging to other companies really, not individuals.
    - PigiVinci83 3y ago
      Unless it’s proprietary data (or data acquired from third parties and elaborated), the other source is mainly web scraping and this is regulated. You need to have the rights to scrape this data, which it means that it’s public data
mdaniel 3y ago
this particular substack link didn't paywall me, but someone had already made an archive.ph for it just in case it blocks someone else https://archive.ph/dmej3 https://archive.ph/dmej3
mrj 3y ago
Poor guy (/s) complains it's hard to sell data they gained surreptitiously. I mean, screw him, people like this is why you have to run 10x the hardware to serve the actual customers. I'm not sure what perspective is gained from this post. He says: it's hard to sell raw data, you actually have to provide some value as a business. Shocking. Scummy scrapper would much rather get something for nothing.
neilv 3y ago
This is a sales pitch.
krembo 3y ago
@all, isn't the idea of scraping and selling data the core business of Google?
ipaddr 3y ago
I am unimpressed with the data being sold. For example $25 for prices from a store over time. I fail to see who this market is for. Who needs the data at this price? They don't tell you what fields, formats just a general description. Not even how big. Doesn't feel good enough
- PigiVinci83 3y ago
  Just enter in the dataset description and see it, and can even download a sample of the file. https://www.databoutique.com/buy-data-page-detail/balenciaga+data+by+re+analytics+srl/r/recZHxXyh9506L9Uk https://www.databoutique.com/buy-data-page-detail/balenciaga... But thanks for the feedback, probably we should make the website clearer

13 points by PigiVinci83 3y ago

danw1979 3y ago

“acquiring high-quality alternative data, gathered from nontraditional sources” ? I’m only a few paragraphs into this, but sure sounds like they’ve been flogging other people’s data so far. I mean, maybe that’s legal in most places if the data was publicly available ?

PigiVinci83 3y ago
Well, alternative data in general is anonymized and absolutely does not contain any personal info (even because PII is useless for hedge funds, they need to see trends not sell something to people).
- danw1979 3y ago
  I meant data belonging to other companies really, not individuals.
  - PigiVinci83 3y ago
    Unless it’s proprietary data (or data acquired from third parties and elaborated), the other source is mainly web scraping and this is regulated. You need to have the rights to scrape this data, which it means that it’s public data

mdaniel 3y ago

this particular substack link didn't paywall me, but someone had already made an archive.ph for it just in case it blocks someone else https://archive.ph/dmej3 https://archive.ph/dmej3

mrj 3y ago

Poor guy (/s) complains it's hard to sell data they gained surreptitiously. I mean, screw him, people like this is why you have to run 10x the hardware to serve the actual customers. I'm not sure what perspective is gained from this post. He says: it's hard to sell raw data, you actually have to provide some value as a business. Shocking. Scummy scrapper would much rather get something for nothing.

neilv 3y ago

This is a sales pitch.

krembo 3y ago

@all, isn't the idea of scraping and selling data the core business of Google?

ipaddr 3y ago

I am unimpressed with the data being sold. For example $25 for prices from a store over time. I fail to see who this market is for. Who needs the data at this price? They don't tell you what fields, formats just a general description. Not even how big. Doesn't feel good enough

PigiVinci83 3y ago
Just enter in the dataset description and see it, and can even download a sample of the file. https://www.databoutique.com/buy-data-page-detail/balenciaga+data+by+re+analytics+srl/r/recZHxXyh9506L9Uk https://www.databoutique.com/buy-data-page-detail/balenciaga... But thanks for the feedback, probably we should make the website clearer