DEV Community

Sunday Victor
Sunday Victor

Posted on

I Built a Medium Article Scraper for Content Analysis & Research.

#webdev #python #automation #opensource

After spending hours manually collecting Medium articles for my research project, I decided to automate the process. Today, I'm sharing my Medium Article Scraper built on the Apify platform.

🎯 What Does It Do?

The scraper extracts comprehensive data from Medium articles:

  • Article Content: Full text, title, and subtitle
  • Author Information: Writer name and profile
  • Metadata: Publication date, reading time
  • Engagement: Response counts (comments)
  • Export Options: JSON and CSV formats

💡 Why I Built This

As a developer working on content analysis projects, I frequently needed to:

  1. Collect articles for sentiment analysis
  2. Build datasets for ML models
  3. Analyze writing trends across topics
  4. Archive important articles for research

Manually copying and pasting was time-consuming and error-prone. This scraper solves that problem.

🛠️ Tech Stack

  • Crawlee: Modern web scraping framework
  • Playwright: Headless browser automation
  • BeautifulSoup: HTML parsing
  • Apify SDK: Cloud infrastructure
  • Python 3.11: Core language

🚀 Key Features

1. Reliable Scraping

Uses residential proxies and automatic retries to avoid blocking. Handles Medium's dynamic content loading gracefully.

2. Clean Data Output

Exports structured data ready for analysis:

{
  "title": "10 Python Tips Every Developer Should Know",
  "author": "John Doe",
  "date": "Dec 15, 2024",
  "read_time": "8 min read",
  "content": "Python is a powerful programming language...",
  "subtitle": "A comprehensive guide",
  "response_count": "42"
}
Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode

3. Easy to Use

Just provide Medium article URLs and hit run. No configuration needed.

📊 Use Cases

For Researchers:

  • Collect articles for academic studies
  • Analyze content trends over time
  • Build corpora for NLP research

For Content Creators:

  • Study successful article structures
  • Analyze competitor content
  • Track writing trends in your niche

For Data Scientists:

  • Create training datasets
  • Sentiment analysis projects
  • Text classification models

For Marketers:

  • Competitive analysis
  • Content strategy research
  • Trend identification

🎓 What I Learned

Building this scraper taught me valuable lessons:

  1. Dynamic Content Challenges: Medium loads content with React, requiring careful timing and selector strategies
  2. Rate Limiting: Residential proxies are essential for reliable scraping
  3. Error Handling: Robust error handling makes the difference between a toy project and production-ready tool
  4. User Experience: Simple input schemas and clear output formats matter

🔮 Future Plans

I'm working on two companion scrapers:

  • Medium Comment Scraper: Extract all comments from articles
  • Medium Profile Scraper: Get author profiles and article lists

🚦 Getting Started

  1. Visit apify.com/sunvic567/medium-article-scraper
  2. Click "Try for Free"
  3. Add your Medium article URLs
  4. Run and download results

Pricing: Pay-as-you-go, approximately $0.10-$0.15 per 100 articles.

⚖️ Ethical Considerations

Please use responsibly:

  • Respect Medium's Terms of Service
  • Don't scrape paywalled content you don't have access to
  • Use for legitimate purposes (research, analysis, personal archiving)
  • Respect copyright - don't republish scraped content

🤝 Feedback Welcome

This is my first published Apify Actor, and I'd love your feedback! Have feature requests? Found a bug? Let me know in the comments.

🔗 Links

What would you use a Medium scraper for? Drop your ideas in the comments! 💬

Top comments (0)