Explain how website, blog and other information is being scraped and used for financial gain by operators of web crawlers, etc.

Based on my research, I now have comprehensive information about how websites, blogs, and other information are being scraped and monetized. Let me compile this into a detailed response.

How Web Scraping Fuels a Multi-Billion Dollar Data Economy

The extraction and commercialization of web content has become one of the most lucrative yet contentious practices in the digital economy. From massive data broker operations to AI training pipelines, operators of web crawlers are converting publicly available information into substantial financial returns—often without compensating or even notifying content creators.

The Data Broker Industry: A $300 Billion Market

Data brokers represent the most established monetization pathway for scraped information. The global data broker market was valued at approximately $277-323 billion in 2024 and is projected to reach between $512-700 billion by 2033-2034, growing at roughly 7-8% annually. These companies specialize in collecting, aggregating, and selling personal and business information sourced largely through web scraping operations.market+2​

Data brokers acquire information through multiple channels: web tracking technologies (cookies, browser fingerprinting, web beacons), public records (court documents, voter registrations), commercial sources (loyalty programs, credit card data), and direct web scraping tools that extract content from forum posts, social media profiles, and public websites. The resulting profiles are sold to advertisers for targeted marketing, insurance companies for risk assessment, political campaigns for voter targeting, and employers for background checks.privacymatters.ubc+3​

Companies like Acxiom, Experian, TransUnion, Equifax, and Oracle dominate this space, operating largely out of public view while trading in the personal information of hundreds of millions of individuals. One investigation found data broker Social Data had exposed 235 million scraped social media profiles from Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube, containing names, profile pictures, and in many cases phone numbers and email addresses—all consolidated into searchable databases for sale to marketers.wikipedia+2​

AI Companies: The New Major Consumers of Scraped Data

The rise of generative AI has created unprecedented demand for web-scraped training data. Common Crawl, a nonprofit archive of web content that predates the AI boom, has become foundational infrastructure for the industry—over 80% of the data used to train OpenAI's original GPT-3 model came from Common Crawl. The web scraping market itself was valued at $4.9 billion in 2023 and is expected to grow at 28% annually through 2032.forbes+2​

AI companies are now paying substantial sums for access to quality data:

• Reddit disclosed $203 million in contractual data licensing agreements, with at least $60 million annually coming from a single unnamed AI company (likely Google)copyright.nova+1​

• OpenAI is paying DotDash Meredith at least $16 million per year for content licensingforbes​

• Thomson Reuters reported $33 million in year-to-date revenue from AI content licensing dealsforbes​

• Shutterstock earned approximately $104 million in 2023 from licensing images to AI developers, expecting this to grow to $250 million by 2027kaptur​

• Bright Data, a leading commercial scraping platform, recently crossed $300 million in annual recurring revenue and now supports 14 of the top 20 global AI labscalcalistech​

However, much AI training data has been acquired without payment. The landmark $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and authors in September 2025—the largest payout in U.S. copyright history at $3,000 per work for 500,000 authors—signals that unauthorized scraping carries serious financial liability.nytimes+1​

Commercial Web Scraping Operations

Lead Generation and Sales Intelligence

Businesses monetize web scraping by extracting contact information from directories, social media, and job listings to create targeted lead databases. Scraping platforms like Yelp, LinkedIn, Google Maps, and industry directories enables companies to compile lists of potential customers with names, emails, phone numbers, and business details. These datasets are then sold to sales teams or used for direct marketing campaigns.dev+3​

Price Comparison and Competitive Intelligence

The e-commerce sector represents approximately 25% of web scraping market consumption. Retailers use automated scrapers to monitor competitor pricing in real-time, enabling dynamic pricing adjustments. Price comparison websites like those tracking Amazon, eBay, and Walmart aggregate scraped pricing data to drive affiliate revenue—earning commissions when users click through to purchase. This price intelligence can provide decisive competitive advantages, with some businesses adjusting prices multiple times daily based on scraped data.promptcloud+3​

Traffic Arbitrage

Search and traffic arbitrage operators purchase low-cost web traffic (paying perhaps $0.02 per click) and direct visitors to pages monetized through higher-paying advertisements (earning $0.05 or more per click), pocketing the difference. Web scraping supports this model by identifying profitable keywords, analyzing competitor ad strategies, and discovering arbitrage opportunities across platforms.adspower+1​

Content Farms and AI-Powered Plagiarism

A particularly exploitative form of scraping involves automated content theft. NewsGuard identified 37 websites using AI chatbots to "scramble and rewrite" stories from major publications like The New York Times, CNN, and Reuters, then republishing them to capture advertising revenue. These operations found programmatic ads from 55 blue-chip companies running on the plagiarized content sites, meaning major brands were unknowingly funding AI-powered plagiarism.gizmodo​

DoubleVerify has tracked what it calls "AI slop sites and networks" that scrape headlines, images, and layouts from reputable publishers, recreate them on fake domains (like "nbcsportz.com" or "247bbcnews.com"), and then copy entire ads.txt files to siphon advertising revenue. The company has uncovered 100 sites engaging in this practice.digiday​

Bypassing Website Protections

While websites can use robots.txt files to request that crawlers avoid certain content, these directives are voluntary and increasingly ignored. Cloudflare documented that Perplexity AI uses stealth crawling behavior, rotating through undeclared IP addresses and spoofing browser user agents to impersonate regular Chrome browsers when their declared crawler is blocked. Despite robots.txt prohibitions and WAF rules specifically blocking Perplexity's bots, the company's scrapers continued accessing restricted content through millions of daily requests across tens of thousands of domains.cloudflare​

This stands in contrast to operators like OpenAI, whose ChatGPT-User crawler fetches robots files and stops crawling when disallowed, demonstrating what Cloudflare describes as "the appropriate response to website owner preferences".cloudflare​

The Legal Landscape: Mounting Litigation

Content owners are fighting back through the courts. Current and recent lawsuits include:

• The New York Times v. OpenAI/Microsoft: Seeking "billions of dollars in statutory and actual damages" for training AI on copyrighted articlesnytimes+1​

• Canadian news companies v. OpenAI: Multiple major publishers including The Toronto Star, The Globe and Mail, and CBC alleging unauthorized scraping of news contenttorkin+1​

• Reddit v. Perplexity: Alleging "industrial-scale" scraping of user comments to train AI systemsreuters+2​

• Getty Images v. Stability AI: Claiming millions of images were scraped to create Stable Diffusion, with trial pendinggroupbwt​

• Thomson Reuters v. ROSS Intelligence: In February 2025, a Delaware court ruled that training AI on copied material constitutes direct infringement and does not necessarily qualify as fair useropesgray+1​

The Meta v. Bright Data (2024) ruling reinforced that scraping contrary to a platform's terms of service constitutes breach of contract, even when data appears publicly accessible.groupbwt​

Underground Markets and Illicit Data Sales

The scraped data economy extends into criminal enterprises. Research tracking 30 darknet markets over eight months found 2,158 vendors selling stolen personal data across 96,672 listings, generating $140 million in revenue. The largest market, Agartha, alone produced $91.6 million in revenue from stolen information—qualifying it as a mid-sized business by U.S. standards.theconversation​

In one case, a hacker offered a database of 500 million LinkedIn records for approximately $5,000 after exploiting the platform's API to extract profile information including names, emails, phone numbers, and industry details.bbc​

Emerging Regulatory Responses

In response to unchecked scraping, new frameworks are emerging. Really Simple Licensing (RSL), announced by Reddit, Quora, Yahoo, and other publishers in September 2025, creates a decentralized protocol allowing AI companies to scrape content with machine-readable licensing terms—though no AI company has yet agreed to its terms.indianexpress​

Over 2.5 million websites have now used Cloudflare's managed tools to completely disallow AI training crawlers. The U.S. Copyright Office released a 108-page report in May 2025 concluding that using copyrighted works to train AI models may constitute prima facie infringement, and that knowing use of pirated or illegally accessed works weighs against fair-use defenses.skadden+1​

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The web scraping economy represents a fundamental tension between open internet access and content creator rights. While scraping enables legitimate business intelligence, price transparency, and AI advancement, it also facilitates massive wealth extraction from content creators who receive little to nothing in return. As one copyright expert noted regarding Reddit's $60 million licensing deal: "We have now established that the data scraped off the internet to train AI has value. And the current payments for that valuable data by all of the AI companies in business is currently $0.00".copyright.nova​

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