API Business Models: 20 Models in 30 Minutes

About

John Musser, CEO of API Science and founder of ProgrammableWeb, discusses the progression of API business models and offers examples of companies that have successfully matched their strategy with the appropriate model. Musser advises companies to define the objectives of their API before deciding on how to best deploy it and challenges them to offer something of value to developers.

Key Points

• Why an API strategy is not a business model
• Most API business models have more than one type of ROI
• API business models are not one size fits all
• Why internal API use is likely the largest source of traffic

"The most successful APIs have more than a single way in which they achieve their return on investment. Everybody in this room knows that it costs money to build, provision, support, evangelize—APIs are not free to build and support. Therefore if you're going to make the case that as to why I'm going to have an API, it helps to have that ammunition of a set of reasons why." - John Musser, CEO