Two years of The Web Scraping Club
Crunching numbers and an outlook for this pubblication.
The first newsletter sent from these pages to a strictly selected audience (2 people) was on the 2nd of August 2022.
From there, after 221 posts, the audience grew to over 1500 subscribers per year, reaching 3300+ readers today.
It is still a niche newsletter, but with a high retention of readers, so this means I’m doing something good.
I’m not a professional technical writer, nor the most organized person on the planet, and probably you’ve seen it from some of the newsletters. Thanks anyway for staying with me, it’s a journey where every day something is learned.
As many of you joined in the past year, let’s know each other better with a series of polls.
What’s your experience with web scraping?
This question helps me understand the type of content to propose for the next 12 months.
What kind of web data you’re extracting/using?
So I can tailor examples inside the articles that are close to your experience
What’s your profession?
In this way, I can understand how much emphasis to give to open-source solutions instead of commercial ones.
Next projects
Writing at least two articles per week is a great challenge: they need to be quality pieces but at the same time, I don’t always have the amount of time I’d like to allocate for them. It’s the same issue that every content creator has: stick to a publishing calendar combining quality and quantity. The first is almost always inversely proportional to the second, and the temptation is to write less but with more quality.
But it’s also true that, given more time, it’s not said that the articles would be 10 times better. All this reasoning is just to say that I’ll try to improve the quality of my articles by creating a more structured writing method, without compromising the quantity.
I’ve also recorded the first 5 interviews of Scraping Insights, a new video series that will be launched on the new The Web Scraping Club YouTube channel.
The guests are:
Nick Rienets, CTO of Kasada
Antoine Vastel, Head of Research at Datadome
Fabien Vauchelles, creator of Scrapoxy
Andrea Squatrito, CEO of Databoutique.com
Or Lenchner, CEO of Bright Data
I hope to release the video with Nick soon, as it is in the final stages of editing, and then, once every two weeks, the others will be published.
This project is possible thanks to your paid subscriptions since I needed to pay the staff for the postproduction. This is why The Web Scraping Club has a paid plan: to offer new content, services, and product tests without relying on sponsors, which means keeping an independent point of view.
Summer Holidays
I’ll be on holiday for the second half of August, so expect some (more) delays when writing me via mail or Discord.
I’m also slowing down the writing of articles, so I’ll publish issue #59 of The Lab next week and then I’ll come back at the beginning of September with the usual calendar.
This time will be used to recharge the batteries and find new energies for the next content to share. Since it was not specified on the paying subscription terms, if this is not acceptable to you, let me know via mail at pier@thewebscraping.club.