Data insights help businesses improve and achieve winning business strategies and operations. Regardless of business size, you can uncover real-time data insights and forecasts. You can adjust based on the insights to optimize the business performance.
You need several data sources for various strategic parameters your pursuing. For example, if you own a Shopify store, you may need this kind of data:
- Product prices, including rivals’ prices
- Sales volume and forecasts
- Ad performance metrics
- Search engine performance and ranking stats
You need to understand your business, market, and competitors. Web scraping help get you the data you need to understand the market and rivals. However, some websites lock their content which can make data collection difficult.
That’s where proxy servers come in. They allow you to bypass content access restrictions for further market research data. Over 25% use proxy servers globally. You can then data-driven decision-making to drive sustainable growth through appropriate strategies.
But proxy servers have several applications than marketing. Other applications include security, privacy, internet traffic balancing, and content filtering. Current proxy server trends show that mobile proxies are rising. But datacenter and residential proxies are still dominant.
Here are five trends you may have missed about proxy.
1. Flexible Pricing and Free Proxy Servers
Although there are paid and free proxies, dynamic pricing is picking up in certain categories of proxies. You can run high-volume data collection, increase online security and avoid IP bans using free proxy servers scraped from various sources across the internet and are updated regularly to give you free proxies that work everytime.
For paid proxies, some providers are offering dynamic pricing based on;
- Market demand
- Gigabytes
- Available domain size
- Ability to target cities
2. The Most Dominant Proxies are Datacenter and Residential Proxies
Datacenter and residential proxies are dominant because they have the largest share market within the proxy service market. Datacenter proxies are IP addresses offered by remote servers housed in datacenters. They help mask your actual IP address, but the servers are shared. So other users may use them simultaneously as you.
On the other hand, residential proxies provide IP addresses based on your target location or city. Datacenter and residential proxies hide your original IP address to help you achieve your goal anonymously and securely.
The proxy server and VPN (virtual private network) industry will grow by 16% annually. The need for data-informed decisions and remote working are some of the growth drivers. The proxy service market will grow to $260 million by 2025. Despite the increasing number of providers, the industry is in a nascent stage.
Yet, the VPN industry market size was $25 billion in 2019 and will grow to $70 billion in 2026. One of the primary differences between proxy servers and VPNs is data encryption. Although the VPN encrypts your data, the proxy server doesn’t.
However, the growth figures and rising need for low-cost data extraction methods make proxy servers vital. But, residential proxies and data center proxies account for the largest market share. Datacenter proxies are popular due to their low cost and higher speeds. Yet, residential is effective for accessing geo-restricted content but more costly.
So, if you wish to conduct your web scraping or quicker monitoring of ad performance, datacenter proxies will be the perfect pick. But, if you’re struggling to get geo-restricted data, the residential proxy is the magic you need.
3. Proxy-Based APIs Increase Web Scraping Success Rates
Proxy-based application programming interfaces (APIs) are also slowly picking up momentum. Proxy APIs have web scraping logic integrated on proxy servers to ensure a 100% success rate. They are designed to crack even some highly protected websites to get data from them.
Besides, most of the proxy-based APIs only charge for successfully retrieved data. It makes sense to any user looking for a robust web scraping tool. Also, it shows the confidence the providers have in the proxy-based APIs.
As a result, most proxy providers are slowly evolving into data collection systems. Proxy APIs use machine learning (ML) like Google’s search engine crawlers. ML helps them optimize their crawl rates and evaluate URLs (uniform resource locators). It detects spam links, duplicate pages, frequency of page updates, etc., to determine its website’s importance.
You can therefore evaluate and target your websites with maximum efficiency. It saves you from headaches and worries about proxy server IPs failing to deliver results.
4. Proxies Have High Usage in Traveling and E-Commerce Platforms
Proxy servers have several applications. Some are white-hat while others are black-hat. For white-hat applications, four major applications account for more than three-quarters of proxy usage:
- Extracting product data, trends, prices, etc., from travel and e-Commerce platforms.
- Data extraction as a service to clients. It refers to proxy servers that have evolved into data extraction platforms.
- Checking your ad performance and tracking competitors’ performance too.
- Tracking marketing performance on various platforms, including search engines
In short, if you’re in the e-Commerce or travel industry, be aware that competitors are extracting massive data for informed decisions. For fair competition and leverage, you should do the same. Understand the competitors’ prices, trends, and product data to adjust your counter-strategy accordingly.
5. Increase in Mobile Proxies
Mobile proxies are also rising, with offers ranging from 3G, 4G, and LTE. They leverage residential proxy servers to rotate IPs and redirect user requests using devices connected to the cellular network. They can mask your IP address allowing you to browse anonymously and securely. As a result, they have a high trust score and are better for targeting geo-restricted data.
Another trend within mobile proxies is dongle-based mobile proxies. This sub-category of mobile proxies has USB sticks containing SIM cards. They use specialized software to turn themselves into proxy servers.
The dongle-based mobile proxies offer more control than a peer-to-peer proxy network. Also, they offer longer uptime and are suitable for on-demand rotation. And the best part is that they have unlimited traffic from mobile carriers.
It is worth noting that the rising demand for mobile proxies is driven by account management for social media and e-commerce. These platforms require very stable and quality IPs to handle the accounts. It makes running ads easy and extracting data without IP bans in restricted regions or cities.
Take Away
The proxy server market is at a nascent stage but with steady growth. In 2025, the market size will be over $250 million, a little drop compared to VPN’s $70 billion. However, with the rising need for data security, privacy, and data-informed decisions.
Datacenter and residential proxy servers still command their dominance in the market. But, there is increasing use of proxy-based APIs with a 100% success of data extraction rate. Also, mobile proxies are picking momentum, with dongle-based proxies offering better rotating IP pool options. Try and change with these subtle trends to adapt accordingly.