Pay Your Data Vendors!

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Everyday it seems we wake up to another lawsuit against an AI company. Scraping data or content without permission. I am a big believer in scraping data. I think there is endless opportunities to build data assets from scraping and most of it is publicly available aka FREE. But there is a ton of content, paywalled data and content or specific click thru agreements that say DO NOT SCRAPE. There are also a ton of companies that sell an API. I am a big believer that if a company sells an API, then you shouldn’t be allowed to scrape their data. Scraping to avoid paying just doesn’t make sense to me.

Stocktwits for example has a great API. Why scrape when you can pay for the API! It’s time to pay the data owners and content owners. Companies like CarbonArc are making it easier for data vendors to sell their data on a consumption basis. Pay for what you need when you need it. Consumption based data pricing is the future and CarbonArc is one of the companies taking us to the promise land. StreamFT, a Social Leverage portfolio company, is making it easier for the data vendors to sell their data in unique ways including consumption base. Their StreamOS product streamlines B2B revenue processes for the unique needs of every business from contract to payments for all billing types.

For buyers there is no excuse. Pay to play. If you want the data pay for it. Sure we can take the Uber approach of move fast, break things, and hope/pray that we are so big it doesn’t matter in 10 years when we pay millions in fines and legal battles. OR we can just pay data vendors and content owners what they deserve. Scraping is here to stay and there is a lot of ways to do it and lots of data to scrape, but if the company being scraped has a paid data feed offering, then its pretty cut and dry. Pay them!

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