Online Media Monitoring: Challenges and Solutions

Types of media monitoring

According to the different kinds of media that exist in the modern environment, it’s possible to differentiate specific types of online media monitoring:

Print

As the name suggests, print media encompasses everything that is printed: magazines, newspapers, periodicals, etc. Despite the fact that the popularity of print media is constantly declining, people still consume it, and businesses largely invest in print ads. Thus, depending on your target audience and industry, it can be beneficial to perform print media monitoring and use the collected insights for brand reputation, public relations, and communication with potential customers. 

Broadcast

Broadcast media monitoring refers to tracking all mentions that happen on TV or radio. This type of monitoring gives you an opportunity to stay informed about your brand’s general reputation “on-air” as well as receive custom reports from media analysts or media monitoring experts with such details as metrics, trends, market perception, and other relevant information.

Digital and social media

This type of media monitoring relates to all the media coverage that can be tracked on public websites, blogs, online news and forums, and social media networks. With digital being the ultimate way for people to get the needed information in today’s environment, it’s essential to invest in its monitoring to receive accurate insights on current trends. Additionally, digital and social media monitoring gives you a deeper understanding of the impressions your target audience has about your company and its products or services.

Who should use media monitoring?

Simply put, every business that interacts with the public and cares about its reputation and positioning in the market should take advantage of media monitoring by implementing media monitoring tools in its activities.

Talking specifically about the types of businesses that should perform online media monitoring, these include but are not limited to:

Startups and small businesses

It’s no secret that to build a successful and profitable brand, you have to stay aware of the conversations that are happening around your organization. And with small businesses being particularly interested in building a strong brand image, online media monitoring becomes integral. It can help find areas for improvement, understand customers’ needs, establish credibility, and deliver essential insights for quicker business growth.

Large businesses

Large organizations, especially those that are known and trusted by the public, need online media monitoring for the purpose of maintaining their competitive edge and responding to new trends and market changes. By extracting and acting upon the data from various media sources, these businesses can understand where to direct their future efforts and investments.

Non-profit organizations

While being driven by specific societal issues, non-profit organizations and advocacy groups have to perform real-time media monitoring to stay informed about the problems they care about and be more effective in addressing them. Data from social media, online news, TV, etc., can help them identify risks, opportunities, and threats as well as relate to their target audience better.

Web scraping for online media monitoring

Online media monitoring companies provide their customers with specific media monitoring tools that deliver the required data. Of course, these companies don’t have thousands of employees that surf through online mentions 24/7 and provide the necessary information to customers. Online media monitoring companies utilize automated scrapers that gather vast amounts of data in seconds. However, this process isn’t that easy and has many challenges.

Web scraping challenges

Above we explained the prominent use cases of online media monitoring. This information helps us understand the main challenges that online media monitoring companies face.

Scraping different data sources

Online media monitoring companies have to ensure that their media monitoring tools are capable of dealing with various challenges because they are gathering information from many different websites. Every website has its own structure, security measures, or other features (e.g. dynamic JavaScript websites). However, usually, there isn’t one solution that can deal with all of the issues, so these companies have to test, search and adapt to the best possible option for their work.

Restricted geo-locations

Some media coverage may only be available from specific geo-locations, so keeping track of publicly available data from many websites requires extensive resources. It’s not a secret that in many websites, the same content can look different when accessed from different countries or may not be available at all. Online media monitoring companies have to solve this problem because if they’re providing their medai monitoring service worldwide, their clients are hoping to get all the necessary information regardless of its geo-location.

Gathering real-time information

Online media monitoring companies have to ensure quality real-time data without any errors. If their clients, for example, need to get customer reviews to quickly deal with negative reactions about their brand, products, or services, they have to be sure that they are getting fresh and relevant data. Review monitoring is an essential part of successful brand management.

Collecting data at scale

In order to collect data for their clients, online media monitoring companies have to go through many websites and gather vast amounts of data. Their tools must be capable of processing huge amounts of information quickly and efficiently. Otherwise, their clients cannot rely on their services. If you’re interested in this topic, check out another extensive article that covers the main issues of web scraping on a larger scale for e-commerce. Keep in mind that big-scale data acquisition is not limited to e-commerce, so this blog post is beneficial for other industries, too.

Security measures of data sources

This is the most common challenge that online media monitoring companies (to be fair, all companies that engage in web scraping regularly) have to deal with. Usually, websites implement security measures to prevent malicious bots. The issue is that it’s hard to distinguish good bots from bad ones. Therefore, good web scraping bots can be flagged as bad and get blocked. Here are the most common security measures:

• IP blocks. Web scraping tools send a huge amount of requests to a website to get the required data. If all the requests come from the same IP address, they are not considered as coming from regular users, and, most likely, will be blocked.  

• CAPTCHAs. It’s a test that often asks users to enter codes or identify objects in pictures. However, most web scraping tools aren’t able to deal with CAPTCHAs and get blocked. Only the most advanced web scraping tools deal with CAPTCHAs.

It’s also worth mentioning that every browser passes specific information to the website’s servers such as OS, language, plugins, hardware, etc. To prevent getting blocked by target websites, web scraping tools have to be capable of passing this information as well. Learn more about browser fingerprinting by reading our other articles.

Being blocked by target websites means that online media monitoring companies aren’t able to provide all the necessary information for their clients.

Web scraping solutions for online media monitoring

Proxies and web scraping

Proxies are crucial for most web scraping projects. Online media monitoring companies usually build their own web scrapers, but without the support of reliable proxies, it’s hard for them to deal with various challenges.

Choosing the right proxy type

There are two main types of proxies:

1. Residential proxies. These proxies have genuine IP addresses provided by ISPs (Internet Service Providers). This is the reason why Residential Proxies have low chances of getting blocked by target websites. Oxylabs Residential Proxy pool has 100M+ residential IPs and covers almost every location around the world. Accessing restricted geo-locations, dealing with IP blocks, and gathering public data from various data sources are some of the best advantages of these proxies. 

2. Datacenter proxies. The main difference between residential and datacenter proxies is their origin. Datacenter proxies aren’t affiliated with ISPs because they originate from secondary corporations like data centers. Compared to residential proxies, Datacenter Proxies have exceptional performance, high uptime, and are faster. However, they are more likely to get blocked by target websites.

Deciding on the best media monitoring solutions for online media monitoring companies depends on their needs. We always recommend testing all the possible options to determine which suits the best. To take full advantage of proxies, there is a possibility to use both types.

Using reliable web scraping tools 

Due to the complexity of the most popular search engines and websites, internal scrapers are sometimes unable to deliver quality results. In this case, professionals in the web scraping field offer reliable tools to facilitate the data gathering process.

Oxylabs offers Scraper APIs, such as SERP Scraper API, E-Commerce Scraper API, and Web Scraper API, specifically designed for gathering publicly available data from sources like the most popular search engines and websites. Online media monitoring companies can benefit from these features:

• Perfect for large scale projects. Scraper APIs are capable of gathering and processing large amounts of media coverage from various sources. 

• High data delivery success rate. The tool extracts data from most websites without getting blocked. 

• Structured results in JSON format. Structured real-time data makes online media monitoring companies’ jobs easier. 

• Supported by the largest proxy pool in the market. Scraper APIs are capable of accessing geo-restricted data. 

• Proxy rotation. If necessary, every request sent to a server originates from different IP addresses, meaning less IP blocks and dealing with CAPTCHAs. 

• JavaScript rendering. Scraper APIs manage to render dynamically loaded content on websites.

Scraper APIs are highly customizable and require zero proxy maintenance. This solution is a perfect fit for companies that want to focus on other tasks rather than dealing with web scraping challenges.

Conclusion

Online media monitoring companies are scraping large amounts of publicly available data daily, and this is the reason why they have to deal with many challenges as well. Reliable proxies or quality data extraction tools help effectively facilitate this process. However, companies that provide online media monitoring services have to test possible options to find the best media monitoring tools for them.

If you’re interested in more information about solutions for gathering vast amounts of data effortlessly, contact us by clicking here. We also have a useful article on gaining competitive intelligence with news scraping – be sure to take a look!