In today‘s ultra-competitive digital landscape, data is king. Companies across industries are scrambling to gather more external web data to gain every advantage possible—from optimizing prices to spotting the latest trends. This data hunger is driving exponential growth in the use of web scraping and proxy services.
According to Oxylabs‘ 2020 Datacenter Proxy Trend Report, adoption of proxy-enabled web scraping solutions is skyrocketing. As businesses realize how data can inform strategy and impact the bottom line, they are turning to technologies like proxies to turbocharge their data gathering.
Double-Digit Expansion in Requests and Traffic
The numbers speak for themselves—Oxylabs saw massive growth in proxy usage last year. Total request volume leapt up 22.7% compared to 2018. That‘s already a stunning increase, but get this: the total traffic volume handled by datacenter proxies exploded by 45.8%!
This indicates users are extracting more data per request than ever before. They aren‘t just incrementally scaling existing efforts, but finding entirely new audiences and use cases for web scraping.
Drilling down, Oxylabs recorded a 47.2% spike in requests just in June 2019 over the previous year. The growth was consistent, with each month showing double-digit gains. With this trajectory, Oxylabs expects 2020 to continue seeing rapid, potentially accelerating adoption of proxy-based scraping.
Surging Demand in Retail and Beyond
Which industries are driving this data-harvesting boom? Retail comes out on top, serving as the largest consumer of proxy services. Ecommerce players especially rely on constant data collection for dynamic pricing, inventory monitoring, and understanding market trends.
Retail proxy requests exploded by 95% in 2019 over 2018 levels. But retail isn‘t the only sector tapping into data‘s potential. Finance experienced nearly as dramatic growth, with an 86% increase in proxy requests last year. Even highly regulated industries like banking and insurance now recognize the benefits, utilizing web data for aggregating financial information, fraud prevention, and investment research.
Other major sectors seeing rapid expansion include travel, real estate, automotive, and more. In today‘s marketplace, no industry can risk having less data than their competition.
Varying Data Needs Between Industries
While the growth is widespread, the scale of data needs differs significantly between sectors. For instance, cybersecurity firms have a much greater requirement for large-scale data collection to power threat intelligence efforts. On average, cybersecurity clients registered 25% more proxy requests than retail customers each month, and 31% higher volume than travel companies.
However, the retail sector as a whole still produces the highest total requests due to the sheer number of organizations involved. The nature of the industry drives a constant demand for updated pricing, inventory, product assortment and other competitive intelligence. For example, leading retailers like Walmart may scrape billions of pages daily to map out the market landscape.
Datacenter Proxies Meet Most Web Scraping Demands
With data needs growing, are datacenter proxies able to handle the workload? The numbers indicate they are more than capable for the majority of use cases. Datacenter proxies offer superior scalability compared to residential proxies. Leveraging dedicated IP addresses from datacenters around the world, they can handle large volumes of requests and data without losing performance.
Datacenter proxies also shine when it comes to reliability and uptime. With high-grade server infrastructure and dedicated technical teams, datacenter proxy networks achieve impressive uptime of 99% or more. This allows them to support mission-critical data harvesting efforts. In addition, datacenter proxies make it simpler and faster to ramp up or down capacity as needed.
The Oxylabs report confirms datacenter proxies are the go-to solution for most web scraping applications. As adoption continues accelerating into 2020, any business seeking to compete should strongly consider investing in datacenter proxies.
Scraping Ethically: The Responsible Path Forward
As web scraping becomes ubiquitous across sectors, following proper ethics and compliance practices grows even more crucial. Responsible web scraping comes down to respecting site terms of service, limiting load, and leveraging captchas and other countermeasures.
For companies new to data harvesting, the best practice is partnering with an established, reputable proxy provider like Oxylabs. Their technical solutions and experienced team can ensure your business gathers data legally and compliantly. This protects your brand while unlocking the true power of web intelligence.
Seizing the Data Advantage in 2020 and Beyond
The trends are clear – we‘ve only begun to scratch the surface of web scraping‘s potential. As businesses big and small better understand the competitive edge data provides, they will continue rapidly adopting proxy-based scraping solutions. Companies in every industry can no longer afford a data deficit.
2020 appears poised for even stronger growth in proxy usage, request volume and data harvesting. Organizations must start aligning their data strategy with business goals. Partnering with an ethical proxy provider opens the door to an unprecedented wealth of web intelligence. Combined with in-house analytics, it can enable transformative market insights.
The future belongs to those who capture and capitalize on web data. Is your business ready to seize the advantage?
