Make Use of Quantcast to Scrape Highly Targeted URLs
Have you ever heard of Quantcast before? Most people who have nothing to do with PPV advertising probably would have heard very little about it over the years, unless of course you have some other specific reason to use it. Still, when it comes to PPV advertising, and scraping URLs in particular, there are few services that are even half as useful as the one offered by Quantcast.
On a very basic level, Quantcast offers a very simple service: All that it essentially does is that it takes a URL and then finds other URLs that people who visited that URL also visited. What this means is that you could find out a ton of websites that are all centered around a particular niche with relative ease! Naturally, you should very easily see why this could be so powerful.
Basically, all you need to do is first go out and use Google or something else to search for various websites in your niche. Once you have a very basic list, you then just need to plug in the URLs to Quantcast and see what it churns up for each one. By compiling the results you should be able to readily see not only a list of related niche-based websites, but also you should be able to spot the ones that are most popular due to the overlap!
Being able to use Quantcast in this way is certainly an advantage. Of course, it isn't 100% accurate at times, and so relying on it as your sole source of URLs would probably not be the best idea. Instead, you should couple this technique with other URL scraping techniques to come up with an augmented list that will serve you better.
As a starting point though, Quantcast will allow you to scrape URLs and not have to worry too much about whether or not people are visiting them. The very fact that a URL appears on Quantcast's results in the first place directly implies that at least someone is visiting them -- and assuming you compiled the results you obtained, you should very easily be able to isolate the most popular ones.
If you really want, you can take the basic Quantcast technique a step or two further, and re-input the URLs that you obtained into Quantcast in order to get yet more results. By having more data to compile, you'll be able to pinpoint the popular websites with far greater accuracy than you previously could.
Of course, as you probably realize, you could keep on rinsing and repeating this method till kingdom come -- but at some point, when you have enough URLs, you should probably stop!
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