Alberta West News: Large internet companies are scraping the net for posted information, repackaging it and selling services to subscribers

The following report analyzes the industrial-scale "scrape-and-repackage" economy as of late 2025.

Executive Summary

A massive, tiered industry has emerged around the systematic extraction ("scraping") of public web data, which is then processed, repackaged, and sold to subscribers. This industry has evolved from simple contact list aggregation into a foundational layer for the modern AI and market intelligence sectors.

The core business model—Arbitrage of Access—relies on converting free, unstructured public data into expensive, structured proprietary insights. Major internet companies are no longer just indexing the web for search; they are "strip-mining" it to train Generative AI models, power financial trading algorithms, and fuel sales intelligence platforms.

This economy has created a "problem-solution" cycle:

Extractors (e.g., ZoomInfo, OpenAI) scrape data to sell insights or capabilities.
Infrastructure Providers (e.g., Bright Data) sell the tools to bypass anti-scraping defenses.
Privacy Defenders (e.g., DeleteMe) sell subscriptions to remove that same data, effectively charging users to clean up the mess created by the first group.

1. The "Repackaging" Business Models

The industry can be categorized into four distinct segments based on how they transform scraped data into a saleable product.

A. The Model Builders (Generative AI)

Primary Players: OpenAI, Google (Gemini), Anthropic, Perplexity.
The Repackaging: These companies ingest billions of public webpages (articles, code, forums) to train Large Language Models (LLMs). The "service" sold to subscribers (e.g., ChatGPT Plus, Gemini Advanced) is the intelligence derived from this mass scraping.
2025 Status: The legality of this "repackaging" is the subject of major litigation, most notably The New York Times v. OpenAI. While early defenses relied on "fair use," the industry is pivoting toward paid licensing (see Section 3) to secure legal access to high-quality data.smithhopen+1

B. The Intelligence Mongers (Sales & SEO)

Primary Players: ZoomInfo, Apollo.io, Ahrefs, Semrush.
The Repackaging:
- Sales Intelligence: ZoomInfo scrapes corporate websites, newsfeeds, and privacy policies to build detailed "org charts" and contact lists. They sell access to this database to sales teams for $15k–$50k+ per year.learn.g2+1
- SEO/Marketing: Ahrefs and Semrush crawl the entire web to map hyperlinks and keywords. They sell this data back to marketers who need to know "how to rank," creating a circular economy where websites are optimized based on data scraped from other websites.searchatlas+1

C. The Alternative Data Funds (Finance)

Primary Players: YipitData, Thinknum, Bloomberg (Second Measure).
The Repackaging: These firms scrape "digital exhaust" to predict stock movements before earnings calls.
- Example: Scraping thousands of e-commerce product pages daily to track inventory levels and price changes.
- Example: Monitoring job boards to detect hiring freezes or expansions at public companies.integrity-research+1
Value Prop: Hedge funds pay premium subscriptions (often $100k+/year) for these "signals" that offer an informational edge over the general market.

D. The Surveillance Vendors

Primary Players: Clearview AI.
The Repackaging: Clearview scrapes billions of public images from social media (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn) to build a facial recognition engine. This database is sold primarily to law enforcement and government agencies, allowing them to identify suspects by matching crime scene photos against the scraped database.techdirt+1

2. The Infrastructure of Extraction

A shadow industry exists solely to support these scrapers. "Proxy networks" sell the infrastructure required to scrape the web at scale without getting blocked.

Company	Core Offering	Role in Ecosystem
Bright Data	Residential Proxies	Allows scrapers to route traffic through millions of consumer devices (e.g., home WiFi) to appear as "real users" and bypass IP bans brightdata+1.
Oxylabs	Web Unblockers	Sells "AI-powered" unlocking tools that automatically solve CAPTCHAs and mimic human mouse movements to defeat anti-scraping defenses brightdata+1.
ScrapingBee	API-as-a-Service	abstracting the complexity of headless browsers; developers just send a URL and get back the HTML scrapingbee.

Market Insight: These companies effectively sell "arms" to both sides—providing data collection tools to companies while adhering to "Know Your Customer" (KYC) norms to avoid enabling blatant cybercrime, though the line is often blurry.

3. The "Licensing Wall" Pivot

As of late 2025, the "wild west" era of free scraping is ending. Major data holders are closing their doors to unauthorized scrapers and forcing companies to pay for access.

The Reddit Precedent: In 2024, Reddit signed data licensing deals with Google (~$60M/year) and OpenAI. This marked a shift where user-generated content is no longer "free for the taking" but a licensed asset.reddit+1
The Paywalling of the Web: Platforms like X (Twitter) and Reddit have aggressively blocked unpaid API access. The result is a bifurcated web: "Premium" scrapers (like Google) pay for a firehose of data, while smaller players are locked out or forced to use more aggressive, possibly illegal, scraping methods.

4. The Counter-Economy: Paying to be "Un-Scraped"

A reactive industry has emerged to help individuals and companies remove their data from these scraping databases.

Data Removal Services: Companies like DeleteMe, Incogni, and Aura charge consumers monthly fees to scan data broker databases (e.g., ZoomInfo, Whitepages) and issue automated removal requests.surfshark+1
The Irony: Consumers effectively pay a "privacy tax" to remove data that was scraped from them for free. The cycle is self-perpetuating: as fast as brokers scrape new data, removal services send automated takedown notices, creating a continuous game of cat-and-mouse.

5. Legal & Ethical Outlook

The legality of this industry hinges on the distinction between public data and copyrighted content.

Web Scraping Status: Generally legal for public data (affirmed in hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn), provided it does not breach a login wall or overwhelm servers.
AI Training Status: Highly contested. The NYT v. OpenAI case challenges whether "training" a model on copyrighted articles constitutes "fair use." A ruling against AI companies could force a massive retroactive licensing payment structure, potentially bankrupting smaller AI firms that cannot afford the "Reddit-style" deals.businessinsider+1

Conclusion: The internet has transformed from a library into a mine. The "repackaging" economy is now a multi-billion dollar sector where the primary value extraction comes not from creating content, but from aggregating, synthesizing, and reselling the content created by others.

Alberta West News

Welcome To Alberta West Online News

Blog Archive

About Me

Friday, November 28, 2025

Large internet companies are scraping the net for posted information, repackaging it and selling services to subscribers