APIs: The Future of Content Distribution

The Guardian just announced that it is releasing all its content through an API as well as making available many different data sets through a data store, all of which can be mashed up into others’ sites and applications. They join other organizations - the BBC, National Public Radio, and The New York Times - in releasing APIs; note that it’s the creme of news that sees the wisdom in APIs. The Guardian’s offers more than headlines: articles, video, galleries, everything. It also adds one more important element to its offering: a business model, creating an ad network for users of the API.

Upendra Shardanand, my partner at and the founder of Daylife, has been saying for a few years that APIs are the future of distribution. The Guardian says its API will put its content “into the fabric of the internet.”

The moment that led to the title of my book - when I told publishers to ask what Google would do - came when I was trying to convince a roomful of them to think distributed, to stop believing that their brands were magnets sufficient to attract their entire audience, to go to where the people are, like Google.

The reflex of publishers - the few who agreed - was to think of distribution in terms of widgets (the trend that never was). They also produced RSS feeds, though limited. Note that a few weeks ago, the Guardian also shifted to full-text feeds (I asked about the business impact of this and they told me that there seemed to be none as traffic continues to rise).

Now APIs take distribution to its logical - if unknown and sometimes frightening - limit. Now I could build an application around the news of at least these four outlets - and, with Daylife, headlines from and analysis from thousands more. In the case of a Guardian story, you may read it via my application and not go to the Guardian’s site. Isn’t that insanity? Isn’t that what publishers are complaining about with aggregators? Actually, no, aggregators display only headlines and give links; this is worse if you’re trying to protect your content and traffic to your site. But that’s the old, centralized mediamind way to think. In the new, distributed world, you want to be where the people are. The frightening part has been that once you release your content as data, you lose control of the display, branding, data collection, and revenue. That’s why the Guardian is trying to add its advertising business model - because it wants to release everything; it wants its content to be used all around the web. This is the new distribution.

News organizations already lost control of packaging, whether they all knew it or not, when most of us most days come to content not through carefully designed home pages but through search and links and now Facebook. The media brand is less a destination and a magnet to draw people there than a label once you’ve found the content, wherever and however you found it. So the more places you can find it, the better.

Comments

[Oren Michels:]

Jeff - incredibly insightful article; I predict I will be quoting the phrase "widgets (the trend that never was)" for the next year or two.

Daylife has been a huge leader in APIs, and as you say, it is clearly the "creme of news" that sees the wisdom in this channel. As it is in the other verticals where Mashery is launching APIs - retail, real estate, mobile, etc.

Mashery is proud to be the provider of the API infrastructure for The Guardian, The New York Times, and Daylife, among others...and we are seeing a broad range of companies using these examples as justification for their own APIs.

Fun stuff.

Oren Michels
CEO
Mashery

Mar 11 06:18 PM

[David Jackson:]

Jeff, terrific article. Thank you.

I want to drill down, however, on your assertion that APIs will be successful. Do you remember how advocates of RSS made similar arguments a few years ago? They said that users wanted content on their own terms, and that RSS would allow users to fragment individual sites' content and reassemble it for themselves in an RSS reader. And they argued that ads in full text RSS feeds would be as profitable as traditional web site ads.

But if judged by the degree of adoption outside the tech community, RSS has generally been a failure. Perhaps the reason is that readers wanted intelligent aggregation: they want to know which topics are important, and which articles to read on those topics. RSS couldn't do that, because most RSS readers force the user to browse all the subscribed-to RSS feeds and piece together any themes for themselves.

The winning model turned out to be Techmeme, which does exactly that: it tells me which topics are hot and which articles to read on them. Here at Seeking Alpha, we've followed a similar model with our home page: we've moved away from a "stream of content" to intelligent clustering of articles by "story". (Here's how Editor in Chief Mick Weinstein explains it: seekingalpha.com/artic...)

And what happened to RSS monetization? Feedburner offered ads in RSS, but nobody reported that they made any real money from them.

So the question is: How are APIs different from RSS?

It would be great to hear your explanation of that. (And Oren's too.)

Mar 11 07:04 PM

[Scott Rafer:]

@davidJ

A lot us, Oren and myself at Feedster included, made the mistake of thinking that RSS might be a consumer service. The primary, and in many cases only, difference between RSS and APIs is who the target is -- developers, not consumers. Often APIs are implemented as RSS (aka RESTful APIs).

Mashery, where I'm a cofounder, makes APIs manageable and economic in ways that RSS-as-consumer-servic... could never be.

Mar 12 12:11 AM

[Tradememe:]

Hello David,

Intelligent aggregation is a very good choice of words, I believe. And we do agree that Techmeme has shown the way in that field. We at www.tradememe.com endeavour to do the same in the business field.


On Mar 11 07:04 PM David Jackson wrote:

> Jeff, terrific article. Thank you.
>
> I want to drill down, however, on your assertion that APIs will be
> successful. Do you remember how advocates of RSS made similar arguments
> a few years ago? They said that users wanted content on their own
> terms, and that RSS would allow users to fragment individual sites'
> content and reassemble it for themselves in an RSS reader. And they
> argued that ads in full text RSS feeds would be as profitable as
> traditional web site ads.
>
> But if judged by the degree of adoption outside the tech community,
> RSS has generally been a failure. Perhaps the reason is that readers
> wanted intelligent aggregation: they want to know which topics are
> important, and which articles to read on those topics. RSS couldn't
> do that, because most RSS readers force the user to browse all the
> subscribed-to RSS feeds and piece together any themes for themselves.
>
>
> The winning model turned out to be Techmeme, which does exactly that:
> it tells me which topics are hot and which articles to read on them.
> Here at Seeking Alpha, we've followed a similar model with our home
> page: we've moved away from a "stream of content" to intelligent
> clustering of articles by "story". (Here's how Editor in Chief Mick
> Weinstein explains it: seekingalpha.com/artic...)
>
>
> And what happened to RSS monetization? Feedburner offered ads in
> RSS, but nobody reported that they made any real money from them.
>
>
> So the question is: How are APIs different from RSS?
>
> It would be great to hear your explanation of that. (And Oren's too.)

Mar 12 12:52 AM

[John Groom:]

"The oldmedia mind way of thinking"? You mean, back when media companies actually made money? And they were too "old fashioned" to want to give away their product?

Mar 14 01:40 PM