Twitter Debuts Premium APIs To Allow Developers To Access More Tweets

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Twitter Inc (NYSE:TWTR), on Tuesday, rolled out premium APIs to give more leeway to developers. Twitter premium APIs service is a little more than the free basic service and a little less than enterprise level tools offered to developers through Gnip.

Twitter premium APIs – how does it help developers?

“Launching today in public beta, our first premium offering is the Search Tweets API, which provides access to the past 30 days of Twitter data,” senior product manager Adam Tornes said, announcing Twitter premium APIs. The company plans extending “the access to the full history of Twitter data, going all the way back to @jack’s first Tweet in 2006.”

Talking of Twitter’s earlier offerings, Tornes said they “left a gap that made it painful for growing businesses to deliver scalable solutions to customers—a concern that we’ve heard at developer events, in our forums and in conversations. You’ve also asked us to make it easier to innovate and test new ideas.”

Twitter noted that the new service had been launched to drive forward the innovation for those who have just started, and for an established company experimenting with the new products and ideas.

According to the company, the new API will drive the reliability and stability of the enterprise APIs to a broader developer ecosystem for the first time. Further, it will bring more clarity to the developers, who can upgrade as per their needs.

Twitter premium API would start at $149 per month and goes up to $2,500 per month. A major difference between the premium API and the one provided by Gnip is that the former lets developers pay on a monthly basis.

Twitter also wants the interested parties in the new developer tools to offer more information about themselves like how they want to use the data. The information would help the company identify focus areas and prevent abuse as well, according to VentureBeat. In addition to the premium package, the micro-blogging company will also launch the self-service developer portal for those using premium APIs to offer higher “transparency” in data usage.

To help sell more data

Such a move would help Twitter sell more data, something that it has already been doing to compensate for its advertising business, which isn’t doing too well. There are businesses who pay thousands of dollars to access the additional information about the tweets of users. Information such as searchable archives of tweets enables brands or advertisers to gain better insight about users preferences and know more about when and where their customers usually post.

The importance of data licensing to Twitter can be understood by the fact that the segment contributed $87 million to Twitter’s revenue last quarter, or around 15% of the company’s business.

Twitter lately has been focusing more on offering services to the mid-level developers and publishers. A few weeks back, the company launched the Promote Mode service for a monthly fee of $99 to assist small businesses and aspiring influencers promote ad campaigns on the platform.

On Tuesday, Twitter shares closed down 0.57% at $20.05. Year to date, the stock is up over 23%, while in the last three months, it is up almost 25%.

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