Blog

Feb. 25, 2022, 3:10 p.m.

Google Ads Performance Max has been a great addition to our marketing strategy at Stevesie Data, especially for capturing new leads from search ads. The performance so far has exceeded anything we’ve previously seen possible on Google Ads for a cold audience, after spending years testing Search Ads, YouTube Ads & Display Ads. Oh, and Performance Max completely blows away anything we’ve ever seen while using Facebook Ads (we’ve completely removed our ad spend efforts there as they never worked... Read More »

Nov. 22, 2021, 6:47 p.m.

UPDATE: Just scroll to the bottom of https://top10.netflix.com/ and you can download the raw data. There’s no need to do all of this! On November 16, 2021 Netflix launched a new website reporting its top 10 titles that you can access at top10.netflix.com. This is big news - as many people wish that Netflix would restore its official Data API to scrape popular movies, shows, trends and related viewership data from. Netflix thus far has refused & kept viewership data rela Read More »

Nov. 17, 2021, 5:45 p.m.

For many years the Twitter API remained “approval-only” where developers had to apply for access to obtain a Twitter API Key, then wait a few days (or weeks) and hope Twitter would approve them. But on November 15th, 2021 this all changed for the better with Twitter Ushering in a new era for the Twitter Developer Platform and launching “Essential” access to their API with no approval needed and free access to scr Read More »

May 1, 2021, 11:48 a.m.

Twitter is working on an absolutely amazing & delightful update to its official API in the form of Twitter API V2. The new API is more streamlined and combined previous APIs together into a uniform one. They have also modified how they return data back, returning fully hydrated related objects (such as users) adjacent to the objects you’re querying. E.g. if you’re searching for Tweets with #beer, the new API will not only return the Tweets, but also the user’s who posted these Tweets as fully... Read More »

March 20, 2020, 1:11 p.m.

This article will walk you through how to visualize data from the Guidebox Data API. You’ll want to import & run the Guidebox Movies Workflow Formula to generate the all_netflix_movies.csv file and the Guidebox Shows Workflow Formula to get the all_netflix_shows.csv file (specify netflix in the sources input collection). Data Visualization Let’s start with visualizing the movies - you’ll first want to read all Read More »

March 17, 2020, 10:24 p.m.

Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer - I just know a lot about data scraping after onboarding hundreds of clients onto Stevesie Data as the founder. The following are general guidelines I’ve seen in industry for what constitutes responsible data scraping practices. Nothing in this article guarantees that what you are doing is legal nor illegal to any extent. This is not legal advice! Data Scraping in Industry If data scraping were illegal, we would not have Google. Search engines like Google, Bing &... Read More »

Aug. 2, 2019, 2:50 a.m.

If you’re looking to become an Airbnb host, you’re probably wondering how much you can expect to earn. One way of estimating this is to find the average occupancy rate for specific locations over the next year, accounting for seasons, special events, etc… While Airbnb makes all of this occupancy and pricing data available via its website & app, it doesn’t allow an easy way to aggregate and analyze all this data to get a pulse on the market. We’ll walk through how to get a day-by-day breakdown... Read More »

Aug. 1, 2019, 9:09 p.m.

If you’re looking to collect data from GrubHub for market research (maybe you’re looking to join the ‘Hub with a new restaurant!) you may want to get some overall market restaurant and pricing data from a few cities. Let’s walk through how one could do this, documenting some of the underlying API endpoints that GrubHub publicly uses (with the structured data you want) while using its website or app! First Page of Results The simplest place to start is with the GrubHub search endpoint which... Read More »

July 30, 2019, 12:49 a.m.

When using the YouTube Data API to scrape non-public YouTube data (like subscribers), you’ll be prompted for a YouTube Access Token to verify that you are who you say you are - and have the right to access the data you’re requesting (e.g. a subscriber list that is only available to the YouTube channel owner). While you’re welcome to spend 9 hours reading up on Google APIs OAuth 2.0 protocols, scopes, grants, and oh so much more - if you simply need to use the YouTube Data API to downlo Read More »

July 30, 2019, 12:27 a.m.

If you’re using the YouTube Data API to scrape public YouTube data (like comments, video statistics, search results, etc…), then you’ll need a YouTube API Key in order to access the API and scrape the YouTube data you need. We’ll walk you through how to create a new YouTube API Key (all you need is a Google Account), how to secure it, and how to access it in the future. Just follow these steps to get started, or skip to section II to find your existing YouTube API Key. I - Create a New... Read More »

July 16, 2019, 2:42 p.m.

In the wonderful world of retail there are several identifiers for products - ranging from UPCs (Universal Product Codes) to SKUs (Stock Keeping Units). When you’re buying or selling a product, you typically have one of these pieces of information, but not the other. We’ll walk through the case where you have a list of SKUs for Home Depot products and need to convert that to a list of UPCs (perhaps to use with some third party software that only works with UPCs). We’ll talk about how one... Read More »

July 11, 2019, 1:29 p.m.

If you’re looking to collect ALL the Airbnb listings for a location, not just the first 300 that Airbnb returns by default, you’ve found the right article. If you go to Airbnb’s Official Website and search for listings, you’ll notice that you can only paginate up to about 300 before you get cutoff. If you’re searching within a large city, you know there’s way more than 300 listings! So how to we get them all? The trick here is to note that Airbnb returns 300 listings per search and offers... Read More »

Feb. 6, 2019, 5:48 a.m.

What makes people click, like & share online images? Is it the colors, composition, contrast, tones or something else? In this post, we’ll walk through developing an algorithm to predict whether or not an image is popular on GrubHub with 65% accuracy. Part 1 - Getting Training Image Data In this exercise, we’ll keep things simple and focus on predicting whether or not an image’s click through rate will exceed a certain percent or not. Ideally, we’d like to train our system on images with a... Read More »

Nov. 6, 2018, 1:04 a.m.

With so much Airbnb data available, it can be hard to get a grasp on the trends and demands in your area. Here, we’ll explore ways to visualize Airbnb listings using Python and popular visualization libraries. Check out the Airbnb Listings endpoint, where you can retrieve structured data for listings around the world. You can enter a city or just use the default settings to get listings from all over the world. If you execute the endpoint, you’ll see an option to download the Expanded CSV... Read More »

Oct. 27, 2018, 11:09 a.m.

When Tinder released Smart Photos, a feature that tests your photos to increase matches, they also released an API endpoint with some very interesting data, notably “Success Rate” for each of your photos - also returning this data back in the response from the Tinder profile endpoint. You’ll notice it send back a successRate for some (or all) of your photos if you have the feature enabled. Exactly what successRate represents is a mystery, but one would guess Read More »