Publishers Enter the API Era

The tech world is obsessed with platforms. Facebook and Twitter have grown, in large part, thanks to opening up to outside developers. More companies are doing so in the form of application programming interfaces, which allow data to be easily manipulated by others. Foursquare and Spotify are just two recent examples of Internet services opening up their data to others.

Now publishers want in on the action. A handful of news publishers are looking at their vast trove of content as valuable data that developers can use to hack into something new. These efforts at opening APIs, while early, are being done with the hope that someday, new revenue streams will present themselves.

The New York Times now publishes upwards of 16 APIs, having launched its first back in 2007. The Guardian provides data-related APIs, in addition to ones that surfaces over 10 years of editorial content. Even USA Today is moving into content APIs, holding a hackathon in December at its Virginia headquarters that was won by a developer who used the paper’s census data to construct a mobile game in which users would guess the right census numbers.

Read the full article at Digiday.

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