This presentation was given at OSCON in July of 2010.
When launching the API at OSCON in 2008, NPR targeted four audiences: the open source community; NPR member stations; NPR partners and vendors; and finally our internal developers and product managers. In its short two-year life, the NPR API has grown tremendously, from only a few hundred thousand requests per month to more than 60M. The API, furthermore, has enabled tremendous growth for NPR in the mobile space while facilitating more than 100% growth in total page views in the last year.
This presentation was first published on June 25, 2010.
The NPR API has been the great enabler to achieve rapid development in the mobile space. That is, because we have our rich and powerful API, our mobile team is free to pursue the development of their mobile products without being encumbered by limited internal development resources. The touch-point between the mobile product and our content is fixed which means the mobile team can focus on design and usability for the specific platform.
It has been more than a year since my last post about API usage, so this is long overdue. Needless to say, the NPR API has grown tremendously since its launch in 2008. The biggest consumer of the API is still NPR by a long shot. That said, member stations, partners and the general public have been making extensive use of the API.
Below are metrics on the API followed by a suite of examples of how it is being used. But first, here are a few qualifiers to the statistics:
– These statistics are about requests to the API, not necessarily what was consumed by or presented to users.
– These numbers were obtained through server logs. Although we believe they are largely accurate, it is possible that these numbers are off by a couple percentage points in either direction.
– A request to the API can mean many things. For example, on the NPR News iPhone app, the Top Stories section is populated by one request to the API – that one request returns many stories. The Flash Player on NPR.org, when playing a single piece of audio, represents one request to the API for exactly one story. Meanwhile, some requests (such as a story page on WBUR.org) get exactly one story, but because they get cached result in many page views for that one request. As a result, metrics around requests are imperfect. That said, they do offer some information about usage and consumption, even if not the whole story.
The NPR API has grown tremendously since its launch in July 2008. Most of the requests today are from NPR products, but a sizable portion of the activity is also from public usage and requests from NPR member stations. Daniel Jacobson/NPR
The big jump in total API requests from July to August are due to the launch of many new products in July. Among them are the new NPR.org, the NPR.org Flash Player, the NPR News iPhone app, WBUR’s new web site, and Minnesota Public Radio’s new site. Since then an increasing number of applications have been implemented on the API, including the NPR mobile site and other station sites (like KQED and KPCC), accounting for the steady growth over the last few months.
In the six months of tracking stories delivered, the NPR API has delivered almost five billion stories. Last month alone, it pushed out over 1.1 billion. Daniel Jacobson/NPR
The total number of stories requested is a new metric that we started tracking in October, 2009. This is the number of stories requested, not the number necessarily delivered or consumed by a user. This metric is based on the numResults parameter (or lack thereof) in the API request. And to be clear, in March, 2010, the API did deliver over 1.1 billion stories! Since tracking this metric six months ago, the API has handled almost 5 billion story requests.
The current distribution of requests by output formats are as follows: NPRML – 86%RSS – 5.8%JavaScript Widget – 2.6%PodcastRSS – 1.6%HTML Widget – 1.5%MediaRSS – 0.7%JSON – 0.14%Atom – 0.01% Daniel Jacobson/NPR
Overwhelmingly, NPRML is the dominant output format delivered by the API. That said, most of the requests are from NPR and related products. In the past, prior to NPR building out the new site, iPhone app, etc., the distribution was slightly less NPRML-heavy. Those models had a distribution of NPRML at about 55% and RSS at about 25%, with MediaRSS, JS and HTML getting reasonable traffic but significantly less than RSS.
Although the API has always been dominated by NPRML requests, this dominance has only been more dramatic with the myriad launches in July 2009. Prior to those releases, NPRML represented about 55% of the 3.5M requests. Now NPRML represents about 85% of the 53M requests. Daniel Jacobson/NPR
As you can see from this chart, the non-NPRML formats have grown a bit over time, especially the JavaScript Widget in recent months. Prior to August, 2009, NPRML was still very dominant, but it its use was substantially closer to the use of the other formats.
Although NPRML is overwhelmingly dominant, the other eight output formats do get a lot of requests. Over the last several months, RSS and JavaScript Widgets, in particular, have seen the most growth. Surprisingly (to me, at least), ATOM has remained almost non-existent. Daniel Jacobson/NPR
Abstracting away NPRML, it is much clearer how the other formats have grown over time. RSS and the JavaScript Widget have really grown tremendously over the last year. Mix-Your-Own-Podcast launched in December, 2008 and took a while to start its growth.
To get a sense as to what is creating all of this traffic, I have created a presentation that shows a range of examples on how the NPR API is getting used. The following presentation is probably missing some interesting and heavily-accessed examples, but it should give you an idea as to how pervasive the API has become.
Given the growth charts above, along with the introduction of the API to station sites and the launch of the iPad and other upcoming tablets and portable devices, we expect these numbers to continue to climb.
Finally, if you are aware of some interesting implementations using the NPR API, please let us know in the comments here or by emailing us at techcenter at npr dot org.
I original published this presentation on April 7, 2010 to demonstrate some of the usage and metrics of the NPR API. In addition to the flow of an NPR story from creation to distribution, I also tried to provide a reasonable sampling of the more popular or interesting implementations.
This presentation was first published to my Slideshare account on October 5, 2009 and was used in different forms to demonstrate the power of the COPE model in content management and API development. It shows the same NPR story displayed in a wide range of platforms. The content, through the principles of COPE, is pushed out to all of these destinations through the NPR API. Each destination, meanwhile, uses the appropriate content for that presentation layer.
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