I'd say scrapers have always been popular, but I imagine they're even more popular nowadays with all the tools (AI but also non-AI) readily available to do cool stuff on a lot of data.
Bingo. During the pandemic, I started a project to keep myself busy by trying to scrape stock market ticker data and then do some analysis and make some pretty graphs out of it. I know there are paid services for this, but I wanted to pull it from various websites for free. It took me a couple months to get it right. There are so many corner cases to deal with if the pages aren't exactly the same each time you load them. Now with the help of AI, you can slap together a scraping program in a couple of hours.
I'm sure it was profitable in keeping him busy during the pandemic. Not everything has to derive monetary value, you can do something for experience, fun, kick the tyres, open-source and/or philanthropic avenues.
Besides it's a low margin, heavily capitalized and heavily crowded market you'd be entering and not worth the negative-monetary investment in the short and medium term (unless you wrote AI in the title and we're going to the mooooooon babyh)
