API Monetization Options/Opportunities

[rahulkrish]

Your take on platforms like Twitter moving from a potential API company to an advertisements/media based one. It's sad that services like Twitter that form a part of our digital life turning out to be just advertising platforms vying for the opportunity to sell our clickstream to advertisers.  What are or What will be monetization options that such platforms have to remain in the API business than fighting for screen real-estate? 

[Kevin Swiber]

Twitter is an interesting case.  Much like Google has done with Adwords, Twitter is taking a context-driven approach to the classic online advertising model.

Twitter has a very large amount of data.  They could package and sell that data in any number of ways.  Exposing historic analytics and filters over an API would have been one option.  There are services scraping the public timeline today for products such as sentiment analysis.  Twitter could have made it much simpler to provide sentiment analysis as an API mashup (at a price point).

That's just one simple example.  There is great opportunity to create and enhance emerging markets around social media.

To "remain in the API business," I think a company should have a business model around APIs.  This is not Twitter's strategy, as far as I can tell.  However, I'm sure there's a ton of money to be made on their chosen advertising model.  As far as I know, this could just be Step 1 in their monetization strategy.

Hopefully, it is.  I'd love to see them succeed as part of an API economy.

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Kevin Swiber

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On Friday, September 21, 2012 at 11:15 AM, rahulkrish wrote:

Your take on platforms like Twitter moving from a potential API company to an advertisements/media based one. It's sad that services like Twitter that form a part of our digital life turning out to be just advertising platforms vying for the opportunity to sell our clickstream to advertisers.  What are or What will be monetization options that such platforms have to remain in the API business than fighting for screen real-estate? 

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[rahulkrish]

A very valid point! Also scraping content means you are collecting more noise & hence have to invest heavily on technology to process signals from noise. The below models had crossed my mind too and makes me wonder why service providers liek Twitter are not leveraging it. I too have come across a lot of products that does sentiment analysis and depend heavily on scraping user timelines and start talking about BigData, Hadoop etc :)  I recently had the chance to discuss this with one such analytics provider working on the hospitality domain. According to him there are lots of privacy regulations that are forcing service providers like Twitter not to share these data whereby forcing  products to go back to screen scraping. What are your thoughts on the role that regulations/privacy concerns have to play. 

I really hope Twitter goes back to being an API company building a  great eco-system around it than trying to kill it ,as a part of their on screen advertisement strategy. 

Another crazy & stupid dream(nightmare in fact) I tend to have is that service providers being able to enforce context specifc advertisements through the API channel :P 

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Rahul

[OneAPI4SMS]

What are examples of a pure API company.
I'd say Twilio is a communications services provider, not an API company.
OneAPI4SMS (mine) is an API company. But can it be sustainably monetized.
The question I struggle with.