How to make money with APIs?

Convener

Chris T

Jennifer Marsman (@jennifermarsman), Chris Roland(@chrisroland), Kevin S., John Fair (@johnbfair), Greg Scott (@gregoryjscott), Quin Lee, Chris Stewart (@650redhair)

What is the hardest way to make money with APIs?
- Write a book on them
- Measuring/metrics/metering (how do you quantify it?)
- Waking up and writing an API to help someone else (or entity) more money w/ APIs
Opportunities
- Retail future vs current
  - We've moved away from physical products and onto services (Netflix, Redbox, Amazon Prime, etc) via subscriptions
  - Services enable people/devs to innovate, but how do we monetize that?
- Mapping, spatial analysis, & data
  - Where am I going, how long will it take, what am I going to do when I get there, etc?
  - The data behind the maps (mapping more than just the physical world)
  - WalkScore
- Several different ways to monetize APIs (partnerships, selling data, direct monetization, etc)
- Charge more to give customers access to your API (enterprise access to your platform)
- There are opportunities in API mashups (Google Maps + Airplane data) to create whole new revenue streams.
  - Create a new super-service using a series of publicly available APIs
  - Make the data actionable through combining sources that other people wouldn't know, or be able, to centralize themselves
- Enterprise vs personal monetization
- Crowdsourcing data aggregation (innerpub/interpub, StackOverflow, etc)
Ideas
Strategies