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Building and maintaining the scraper is the not cost they would use to measure it internally. It’s the cost to build the API, and support it and perhaps any perverse incentive it creates where even more data flows out to competitors.



For all intents and purposes, this isn't competitive data for them. There aren't really competitors in the space anyway, the barrier to entry is ridiculous. In fact, by law, operators in the industry are required to share this particular data with each other and industry regulators. But they don't share it with outside parties in the aggregate form we need it in. Hence, the scraping.


Building API is 5 times easier than building routes for your public webpages, which is basically an 'API' as well.


And the cost of being scraped.




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