Spill The Coffee

Jeff Jarvis wrote a very intuitive post on APIs – application programming interface – and how The Guardian newspaper is turning the keys to the content kingdom over for building and distributing apps. He writes:

The Guardian’s offers more than headlines: articles, video, galleries, everything. It also adds one more important element to its offering: a business model, creating an ad network for users of the API.

Upendra Shardanand, my partner at and the founder of Daylife, has been saying for a few years that APIs are the future of distribution. The Guardian says its API will put its content “into the fabric of the internet.”

Jarvis continues on to say that the old media way is to attempt to bring the people to your site. Now, we must bring the content to the people. Build ads around widgets that readers will use more frequently to keep up with news. Very cool. But will big media companies truly ‘get it,’ or will they continue to see traffic, time on site and page views as the measuring sticks of success. Perhaps more importantly, how will media buyers see these widgets and apps versus the static web site?

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