How much does it cost to advertise on ProgrammableWeb?

When it comes to the king of APIs website, it is not killerapi.blogspot.com, it is ProgrammableWeb.

ProgrammableWeb has a comprehensive directory of APIs, and mashups created. It also regularly blogs on API news. It draws in huge traffic from developers, the number one website where developers go to. That makes it the undisputed king.

Because of how good they are, they naturally becomes the number one choice for advertising API products.

I thought it is good to share information about advertising on ProgrammableWeb:

• 550,000 pageviews per month
• 170,000 unique visitors per month
• For a tiny 125x125 ad on the right side, it costs $2,500 per mth, that is $4.50 CPM. There are other banners, of course, at higher price
• 40% of traffic comes from US

That makes ProgrammableWeb a pretty good place for advertising your APIs.

Ah.. lastly, I hope this website will one day be the king of APIs :)

The Trend is JSON as Response Format

Many API providers are adopting JSON as the standard, and only, format in API.

Take twitter trends API for example, which they have announced they will switch the API to JSON only.

The reason quoted is that the usage for XML format is significantly low. So if you are designing an API today, you can consider support just JSON. That's the trend.

Free Conference API from Speek

Speek provides a simple API for doing free conferencing, that is speaking to multiple people on a line.

It is interesting that they are adopting a free model, with brief audio advertisements inserted into the call. 

A promising API provider in the voice communication space. Watch out for the monkeys!

Google Translate is Now a Paid API

Google has announced a paid version.

The language translation service costs $20 per million characters of text (or approximately $0.05/page, assuming 500 words/page). To use, look at their v2 doc.

While Google is coming up with paid APIs, developers are digging out secret, free APIs, like the speech recognition API in Chrome.

Lessons from Stack Exchange

Kevin Montrose has posted on the history of Stack Exchange API and a subsequent post on the mistakes.

One cool thing about their API design is that they have mandated using Gzip in their response. The reason is that they felt compression/decompression using CPU resources is cheaper than bandwidth. 

Refer to their gzip usage.

Vectorized Requests in API

Vectorized requests is an API technique that is becoming more popular these days. It is a way of requesting a multiple resources in a single http request

For example, you can request multiple users with the following:

http://myapi.com/users/1001;1002;1003/

These technique is seen in twitter API and StackExchange API.

It is an efficient technique if your API usually results in developers calling the same resource multiple times. Why make 100 request for 100 users, when you can make just 1 request?

Developer Contest

Box Mobile Dev Challenge
Box.net provides API for sharing files on their platform. A mobile dev challenge is now open, with 1st prize $25,000 cash! You have up till Sept 9 to submit an app.


twilio & Box
twilio regularly organize developer contest. For this week, they have partnered with Box to organize one. By using twilio API and Box API, you are eligible for twilio contest. There will be 3 winners, and the first will get an 11" macbook air!


Kik Awards
Kik provides SDK for Android and iOS to share content via Kik messenger. They are giving out 3 cash award of $5,000 each for apps submitted by Sep 5th.