Apify vs Apify: 0.43% of Catalog, 29.5% of Demand

Apify · marketplace signal

apify.com →

The Apify Store operates as an open marketplace where any developer can publish actors. As of 2026-05-16, 3,015 publishers have shipped at least one. One publisher — Apify itself — operates 110 actors of the 25,787 total catalog. That is 0.43% of the catalog.

Those 110 Apify-published actors hold 141,464 30-day active users, against an aggregate 480,052 across the entire Store. 29.5% of all Store demand flows through Apify-the-publisher’s own catalog. The disproportion ratio between Apify’s catalog share and demand share is 69×.

On the tracked subset of 3,155 actors with continuous data history, the asymmetry is even sharper: Apify-published actors are 1.08% of catalog and 41.2% of total runs — an active-usage measure rather than a unique-user measure.

The single largest competitor on the Apify Store is Apify itself.

Where Apify wins on its own marketplace

What the 110 Apify actors actually are

The top 12 Apify-published actors by 30-day demand:

The composition is consistent. Of Apify’s 34 tracked actors, 23 are PAY_PER_EVENT and 11 are FREE. The PPE actors target the largest social-media surfaces (Instagram, Facebook, TikTok proxies, Google Search). The FREE actors are developer tooling and AI-buyer-facing primitives (Web Scraper, Cheerio Scraper, Website Content Crawler, RAG Web Browser).

This is not a portfolio of “Apify dabbles in scraping.” It is a deliberate first-party catalog covering the highest-demand verticals on the Store. Four of the top seven scrapers on the entire Store are Apify-published (Instagram, RAG Web Browser, Instagram Profile, Google Search Results); the other three top-7 entries are third-party (compass Google Maps, clockworks TikTok, curious_coder LinkedIn Jobs).

Why this matters more than the headline suggests

Marketplace dynamics where the platform operator also competes as a publisher on its own platform are a recurring tension. The pattern shows up most visibly in Apple’s App Store (Apple-published apps like Music, TV, Files holding category-leader positions), Amazon’s marketplace (AmazonBasics competing with third-party sellers), and YouTube’s premium content (YouTube Originals on the same surface as third-party creators).

The competitive question is whether the platform’s first-party catalog absorbs demand that would otherwise go to third-party publishers, or whether it creates the floor of platform value that drives buyer adoption in the first place. Both effects exist; the balance differs by platform.

On Apify, the balance reads as floor-creating rather than absorbing, for three structural reasons.

Apify’s flagship actors are categories third parties under-serve. The Web Scraper / Cheerio Scraper / RAG Web Browser tier exists because the platform needs canonical free framework actors to onboard developers. No third-party publisher has commercial incentive to build a free, fully-featured general-purpose web scraper as their flagship; the marginal economic return is zero. Apify ships these as developer-tooling distribution, the way GitHub ships Codespaces or Vercel ships v0 — as platform-acquisition surfaces rather than competitive entries.

Apify’s paid flagships target high-demand verticals where multiple third parties also compete. Instagram, Facebook, Google Search are the most-scraped surfaces on the public internet. Apify’s PPE actors in these categories sit alongside dozens of third-party alternatives. The third-party Instagram actors collectively hold meaningful demand; Apify’s lead is real but not exclusive. The Q1 2026 lead-extractors census documented similar dynamics in LinkedIn, where Apify is not the leader and third-party publishers (harvestapi, dev_fusion, apimaestro) own the segment.

Apify-published actors do not get preferential ranking in the Store catalog. A third-party Instagram-targeting actor with better positioning, cleaner schema, and competitive pricing can — and does — rank above Apify’s own Instagram Scraper in category search and discovery surfaces. The third-party publisher’s ceiling is not capped by Apify-the-publisher’s presence; it is capped by buyer preference within an open ranking.

What the dynamic implies for third-party publishers

For publishers building on the Apify Store, the 29.5% Apify-publisher share is a structural feature to plan around, not a barrier.

The remaining 70.5% of demand is the actual addressable market. Across 25,677 third-party actors (25,787 minus 110 Apify), the third-party demand is 338,588 30-day active users. That averages to 13 users per third-party actor. The long-tail distribution shape applies: most third-party actors will sit at single-digit users; the third-party leaders in each category capture the bulk of the third-party demand.

Categories where Apify does not compete are the cleanest opportunities. Apify’s 110 actors cluster in social media (Instagram suite, Facebook suite), Google Search, and general dev tooling. Categories Apify mostly does not enter — TRAVEL, REAL_ESTATE, ECOMMERCE, JOBS, LEAD_GENERATION beyond LinkedIn — are entirely third-party territory. Building flagship actors in those segments avoids direct Apify-publisher competition while capturing meaningful per-actor demand.

Apify-as-publisher is not the threat the headline number suggests. A 29.5% share concentrated on 110 actors means each Apify actor averages 1,286 users — high but not insurmountable. Third-party actors with the right targeting and craft routinely operate at hundreds of users per actor (harvestapi LinkedIn, compass Google Maps, fantastic-jobs ATS), some of them above Apify’s own non-flagship actors. The platform is open, the ranking is merit-based, and the third-party share is sufficient to support viable publisher businesses at category-leader scale.

The 0.43%-to-29.5% disproportion is the defining shape of the Apify Store. It explains why aggregate demand growth (currently +14.5% over three weeks, per the monthly pulse) lifts Apify-the-publisher and third-party publishers in the same motion. It does not imply the platform is closed to third-party success.

Sources

• Signal Census pulse: pulse_details.json + store_pulse.json (data window 2026-05-16; 25,787 Store actors, 110 Apify-published, 480,052 sum 30-day active users)
• Signal Census: Apify Store May 2026 — 25,787 Actors, 480k MAU
• Signal Census: Apify Category Growth Race
• Signal Census Q1 2026 lead and contact extractors census