The 2016 Economics of Web Scraping Report

Web scraping is responsible for millions of dollars in lost annual revenue. It is the wholesale theft of website content. On average, 2% of online revenue is lost as a result of web scraping. 

Web scraping, or scraping, is a computer software technique of extracting information from the internet, usually transforming unstructured data on the web into structured data that can be stored and analyzed in a central database. The key culprits behind web scraping are bots, a software application that runs automated tasks, or scripts, over the Internet.

Bots typically perform tasks at a much higher and faster rate than humans alone. They make up 61% of web traffic. Because information on the Internet is public domain, web scraping is legal. However, it has a negative effect on content owners.

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