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"
}

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

• Try the scraper: apify.com/sunvic567/medium-article-scraper
• Twitter: [@sunvic567]

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