The 'API marketplace' and 'API economy' narratives are largely pushed by companies who make API proxies: Mashape, Mulesoft, etc. (EDIT: not Mashable, they're unrelated)
I've yet to hear true success stories in this space; to me it just seems like wishful thinking (on part of the marketplace and on part of API developers) about a second app boom; notably, in the hype cycle, the API boom has largely been superseded by the Chatbot boom, which is functionally very similar, although the gatekeepers are different.
That is not to say you can't make money this way. Perhaps it's useful for hobbyist-level projects, or cut-from-the-same-cloth wrapper APIs that hardly offer anything unique but at least one sucker signs up anyway -- the same as with apps, really. Is this actually a thriving market?
There was a subthread on HN not too long ago from a guy who quit his day job to scale ipinfo.io, which sells an API subscription product for geoIP lookups. He's doing fairly well.
So I think there is a market for services like this, especially since API Gateway takes away a lot of the kinds of scaling headaches the creator talks about in the linked post.
We've been using the Azure API Management on my team for well over a year now on a couple projects. Though monetizing it is still just a goal, it's been pretty useful just for the features auth, logging, CORS, and some routing issues.
I can see how this market has a BS feel to it (and have noticed this too lately), but at least the general concept of "API" leaves a lot of room for interpretation... perhaps much more functionality can be exposed via an API on such a marketplace than could ever be offered by an "app", etc.
My impression is that it's not a big thing yet because many of the tools really don't support monetization any too well right now (I'd be interested in hearing counter-examples). That said, once the tooling catches up, it will be interesting to see if it actually takes off or not.
Yeah, it's a huge huge market for sure. It's why pretty much every Web APP provides an API to integrate with. They don't do it because it's worthless :)
API Marketplace might help discovery. Not sure about that though.
I've yet to hear true success stories in this space; to me it just seems like wishful thinking (on part of the marketplace and on part of API developers) about a second app boom; notably, in the hype cycle, the API boom has largely been superseded by the Chatbot boom, which is functionally very similar, although the gatekeepers are different.
That is not to say you can't make money this way. Perhaps it's useful for hobbyist-level projects, or cut-from-the-same-cloth wrapper APIs that hardly offer anything unique but at least one sucker signs up anyway -- the same as with apps, really. Is this actually a thriving market?