Well...the suggestions sound good - but they are a bit outside of what I am trying to capture. All I am trying to do is to get a sense for the absolute demand

Well...the suggestions sound good - but they are a bit outside of what I am trying to capture. All I am trying to do is to get a sense for the absolute demand (especially relative to other types of gigs) for web development gigs. I think the only way to get a sense of Wages/Salaries would be to start looking at 'Jobs' - which is outside of the scope of the analysis I am doing. One flaw with the 'post removed' though is that sometimes the posts are removed because of spam (i.e. it was created by a spammer or someone with fraudulent intent). So I am not sure how much of a valid proxy that may be here...especially given that another real assumption for people removing posts is that they get inundated with unqualified leads - so they remove it to stop the inbound flood.