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Video Transcript:
Paul: Hi. It's Paul Clifford from Disruptware and I just want to talk about the four ways of increasing your revenue and growing your business using APIs.
Now an API stands for an 'Application Programming Interface' and essentially all it is - is a way of two different applications communicating with each other. Essentially it's something you should incorporate into your SaaS model if you're building an online app, because it's a really a great way of growing your business. You can do this in four different ways.
4 Ways To Use APIs:
1. To get new customers.
2. Charge for usage.
3. Content syndication.
4. Increasing the consumption of data or service.
First of all, you can use it simply to get new customers and you do that by sharing your API with another Cloud application or another SaaS app and integrating the two and of course the partner who you've integrated with, they'll communicate to their customers that they're integrated with you. So you're going to get a slice of their customer base and the reverse is true as well.
Secondly, you can just charge for usage of the API. So if someone has some other tool that they want to access the same sort of data that you're giving away in your API then you could just charge them based on usage. So charge them based on clicks or queries or the amount of data transferred. There are lots of different ways of doing that.
The third thing, is content syndication and this is what newspapers do. Newspapers and news organizations, they publish content and they're dependent on users consuming that. They will provide APIs to consumers and to second tier news organizations so that they can get more people reading their content, get more traffic, more clicks and of course more revenue.
The fourth thing, is just generally increasing the consumption of your data or service and it's something that for example Amazon will do to their current customers. They'll ensure that there's lots of different ways of using their API to grow the usage, because of course at the bottom within Amazon they charge based on storage and usage and that's what they want to increase. So providing as many avenues as possible for customers to use their service, increases their overall revenue.
So, I hope you find that useful, that's four ways of using APIs to grow your business and this is Paul Clifford from Disruptware.
Recommended Resources:
1. Amazon Simple Storage API Documentation - http://aws.amazon.com/documentation/s3/