Articles

Across 3,155 tracked Apify actors (May 2026): 57% serve under 10 users in 30 days, median is 7, only 7 actors clear 10,000. Top 1% of catalog captures 58% of demand; top 100 (3% of catalog) captures 78%. Textbook marketplace power-law.

Of 573 tracked Apify creators, 320 publish 2+ actors. Median HHI is 3,827 — concentrated. 38% are highly concentrated (HHI > 5,000). 'One hit + long tail' dominates; only 17% run genuinely diversified portfolios, averaging 21 actors each.

EU AI Act Article 5 came into force Feb 2, 2025. Untargeted facial-image scraping is now a prohibited AI practice with fines up to €35M or 7% of global turnover. Clearview has absorbed €70M+. In October 2025, noyb filed the first criminal charges.

FREE-pricing Apify actors (6.1% of tracked catalog) capture 11.1% of demand: 233 users/actor vs 168 for PPE and 9.5 for Rental. The $0 tier out-densifies paid by 1.4×. Half are OPEN_SOURCE; the other half are publisher monetization plays that abandoned paywall friction.

Reworkd raised $2.75mn from Paul Graham, Nat Friedman, and SV Angel. They sunset on February 6, 2025. The first notable AI-scraper casualty. The post-mortem reveals what makes Browserbase, Browser Use, and Firecrawl survive while Reworkd didn't.

Of 3,155 Apify actors with continuous data history, 88.3% tag three or more categories. The disciplined 11.7% on a single tag capture 2.3× per-actor demand (255 vs 112 users/month). The dominant tag pair is AUTOMATION + LEAD_GENERATION on 909 actors. Spray-tagging backfires.