{"slug": "four-years-of-the-web-scraping-club", "title": "Four years of The Web Scraping Club", "summary": "The Web Scraping Club newsletter marked its fourth anniversary with more than 7,000 subscribers, founder Pierluigi Vinciguerra wrote, noting the publication has run with no marketing efforts and 0 ads despite a Google SEO issue that removed the domain from search results. Vinciguerra said a new domain address will launch in the next few days to fix the SEO problem, and he credited LLMs with giving web scraping legitimacy, pointing to recent funding rounds for Nimble and Oxylabs as proof the industry's perception has changed. He also plans a job board, a revamped YouTube channel, and a web-scraping event in Italy in October.", "body_md": "August 2022. Inside a hotel room in Tuscany, quite bored because of the rain, I started a project that I had been thinking about for some time. A blog about web scraping.\n\nNever imagined that someone would have read it. It was just an excuse for writing down my scraping notes in a more structured way.\n\nFour years later, both TWSC and the industry look very different.\n\nGive your AI a web data layer – **[Decodo’s Web Scraping API](https://visit.decodo.com/rE0PQB)** turns any site into clean, structured data your models can actually use.\n\n## Health of The Web Scraping Club\n\nFirst of all, thank you.\n\nThank you to all the readers who think I’m saying something interesting enough to be subscribed to.\n\nIn this era, when we’re all fighting for attention, having 7,000+ people who choose to receive this newsletter and open it every week seems like a miracle. \n\nThis is despite no marketing efforts, 0 ads, and an issue with Google SEO that made the whole domain disappear from the results from one day to the next.\n\nIn the next few days, to solve this issue, there will be a new domain address that, according to my experiments, should fix this.\n\nLet me also thank you, all the backers, paying readers, and companies that make this possible.\n\nWhile still very lean, The Web Scraping Club in its current format could not run without sponsors and readers who choose to support it. And about the companies backing TWSC, let me spend a special word on the NetNut team, who are having a hard time now. I’ve met great people there, and they were among the first believers in this newsletter.\n\nBehind the scenes, TWSC is far from perfect, but I’m doing my best to keep things running smoothly. \n\nI’ve just launched a partner portal, where sponsors can monitor their campaign. For the readers, this year we’ve released the new version of the [Proxy Price benchmark tool](https://proxyprice.thewebscraping.club/), which I promise will be updated more often in the future. Also, the [Scraping Wiki](https://github.com/TheWebScrapingClub/scraping-wiki), our repo with all the findings of The Web Scraping Club organized as a second brain, is a recent new entry. Please give it a look and share your feedback.\n\n### What’s next\n\nApart from fixing the Google SEO issue in the immediate term, I’ve got a couple of ideas that still need time to be implemented, but hopefully they’ll see the light before the end of the year.\n\nSomething I’ve been asked for a long time is a Job Board dedicated to open scraping positions and the great talent to fill them. \n\nIs this something you’d like to have here?\n\nIdeally, I’d like to revamp the YouTube channel. And last but not least, I’m working on a web-scraping event in Italy in October. More details soon, but be ready for it!\n\n### How the industry changed\n\nThe industry over the last four years looks very different.\n\nWe got LLMs; we know it, so the coding part is way faster. But what they brought to the industry is the legitimacy of web scraping.\n\nIt seems the world has recognized the role of web data and browser automation in innovation. While web data was once seen as something shady for spying on your competitors, it is now the main moat for training LLMs, and browser automation is the key tool for giving your agents real-time data.\n\nThis changed the perception of the industry as a whole, and the recent funding rounds (Nimble, Oxylabs) are the proof.\n\nThink about it: have you ever heard of a funding round for a proxy company before 2023?\n\n## Conclusion\n\nIt’s an exciting time for the industry, and I’m glad to work at The Web Scraping Club right now. I’ll be at conferences around Europe ([Oxycon in September](https://oxylabs.io/oxycon) and [the Extract Summit in Dublin](https://www.extractsummit.io/)), which will allow me to meet great professionals and learn about the latest trends. \n\nWhile both TWSC and the industry have changed a lot over the years, the spirit of this newsletter hasn't: no marketing fluff, honest reviews, some hot takes, and my personal opinions. I know that in four years, not all articles can be a 10 out of 10, but I can assure you that every article written here was the result of sweat and hard work. And it will be the same for the future.", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/four-years-of-the-web-scraping-club", "canonical_source": "https://www.scraping.club/p/four-years-of-the-web-scraping-club", "published_at": "2026-08-16 03:00:07+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-09-13 15:17:04.140750+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-tools", "ai-agents", "ai-startups"], "entities": ["The Web Scraping Club", "Pierluigi Vinciguerra", "Google", "NetNut", "Nimble", "Oxylabs", "Decodo", "Proxy Price benchmark tool"], "also_reported_by": [], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/four-years-of-the-web-scraping-club", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/four-years-of-the-web-scraping-club.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/four-years-of-the-web-scraping-club.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/four-years-of-the-web-scraping-club.jsonld"}}