11/28/2023 0 Comments Tweetdeck apiIf you’ve ever seen someone cross-posting on Instagram, Facebook, and Twitter simultaneously then you’ve likely seen IFTTT in action. Apps like IFTTT and Zapier are interesting because they’ve opened up the functionality of APIs to non-devs. API consumer marketĪPIs are no longer viewed as complicated, stuffy services that only experienced developers can use. Below we take a look at a few of the major ones, which are particularly important because they’ve helped to demonstrate the usefulness of APIs to the general population. The growth of the API economy isn’t due to any one factor, rather a perfect storm of sectors emerging that all rely on APIs to some degree. On the other side of the coin, this also accounts for why some would-be API providers haven’t bothered trying to compete with the big players in the market.Įssentially, emerging monopolies in the space could account for a leveling effect of the exponential growth ratio of APIs, but doesn’t at all translate to a capping of actual total API calls. Given all of this, it’s easy to see why so many devs are compelled to use dominant APIs that are already out there and have established a good reputation rather than trusting a newer, smaller API provider. They also have a development fund worth 1 million dollars devoted to encouraging up and coming devs to build using their API. The Netflix API has since turned private so there’s no fresh data to compare, but MailChimp more than quintupled the amount of API requests they handle each day to more than 50 million by 2015 and 80 million by the beginning of 2016. Look at the rate of API calls for any popular API in recent years and you’ll see a graph shape that displays rapid growth: But what you may not know, and what many early API growth projections did not necessarily take into account, is just how dominant some APIs are in their spaces today. If you’re reading this post, you’re undoubtedly already aware that APIs are big business. Writing for the Graydon blog, Alice Payne posits B2D, or “business to developer”, as a new form of marketing that has emerged primarily as a result of APIs. For example, there’s only one MailChimp API but ProgrammableWeb cites 15 mashups that have been built using it. “ key thing to consider here is that these numbers are based on publicly available APIs and do not reflect any private API growth at all… In all likelihood, any glitches that we see in Open API growth are expected to happen as the private sector catches up or even surpasses Open API growth.”Īnother thing that early projections may not have taken into account is that so many developers would trust consuming third party APIs rather than building internal solutions themselves. These may not always be listed on app marketplaces because information about them is scarce or actively kept hidden, a discrepancy that Craig Burton has identified: Some organizations only bundle access to their API through premium accounts, effectively making them less visible. More importantly, none of these numbers take into consideration the wealth of private or partner APIs that exist, which some estimate may even outnumber the public total. Although there is certainly much overlap, some of these APIs may not yet reside in the manually curated PW.com directory. For example, APIhound estimates there are 50,000 public web APIs, and APIs.io tracks over 1,000. Note that these numbers may be deceptive for a couple of reasons. First, there are now other API directories that need to be taken into account. This works out to around 40 APIs being added per week, and the total number of APIs represented on the directory currently stands at around 15,000. The ProgrammableWeb directory of APIs reported that in 2015, just shy of 2,000 APIs were added to the site. As it turns out, these estimates were a little on the high side. Like “big data” and “the cloud” did before them, APIs are enjoying mass exposure and appeal to individuals beyond core groups of developers who deal with them on a daily basis.īut how does this growth compare with forecasts a few years ago? Is it sustainable? And why exactly has the space grown so rapidly? Growth by the Numbersīack in 2012, GetElastic and Monetate estimated that we would see 30,000 APIs by 2016. The past few years, however, have seen such explosive growth that the API space is evolving more rapidly than ever before. Salesforce and eBay first allowed access to their web APIs in the year 2000, and other organizations were tinkering with the idea of exposing endpoints even before that.
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