Thoughts on API Best Practices API Management and Infrastructure Blog

Netflix vs. Hulu: Why Looking at Web Traffic Isn’t Enough in the Age of the API

Business Insider recently posted a chart comparing the web site traffic of Netflix.com and Hulu.com over the past few years. The chart shows that in late 2009, Hulu's traffic began to surpass Netflix's. The article's headline suggests that Hulu is "coming up" on Netflix- but these numbers don't tell the whole story.

Much of Netflix's usage comes from the Netflix API, which serves customers using set-top boxes, applications and gaming consoles- allowing users all over to access their content without coming to their website. Google Analytics, Quantcast and Alexa can't tell you about the customer watching videos on their iPad or xBox, or through applications on their mobile phone. In the new world of APIs, multiple devices and multiple channels, website traffic numbers aren't enough- you need to measure API traffic to see what is really going on.

Looking at website traffic alone is like trying to measure Twitter usage by looking at how many people visit Twitter.com via a browser, as opposed to looking at how many people access it through the number of web, mobile and desktop applications that consume the Twitter API. 

The problem with looking at the wrong business metrics- like focusing on website analytics instead of the complex ways customers now consume media- is that it can lead you to the wrong conclusions.... and the wrong business decisions. API analytics are an essential business metric in the post-browser era- and a metric that businesses, analysts and press all need to look at as they try to get the full picture of how companies and content are growing and evolving.

Did Twitter check their API analytics?

Last week Twitter added a new rate limit to the “verify_credentials” method on their API. As a result, a number of applications that expected to be able to call “verify_credentials” more than 15 times per hour stopped working. The regular Twitter rate limit is 150 requests/hour, so Twitter is essentially saying that “verify_credentials” can only be called once for every 10 other API method calls that are made.

According to Jesse Stay, Twitter made this change without any notice to their developer community because they “assumed (apparently incorrectly) that people are only using this method occasionally.”

Twitter does a great job with their API – they make it easy to use and handle huge volumes.  

But this is a great example of the need for API analytics.   It should be fast and easy for any API product or engineering manager to drill down into “how often is verify_credentials called,” or better yet, “how often does the average API user call verify_credentials,” or even, “who are the top users of this API method?”  

We all have Web analytics to help us make decisions for our websites - we need the same decision support for APIs.