Rdio is a music streaming service, where users can access music via the web or mobile phone for a monthly fee.
Using
Mashery, Rdio provides a RESTful API where you can do just about anything you can trough the web interface.
Rdio provides a pretty significant incentive for their developers, in the form of revenue sharing.
Developers of the
Rdio API can earn recurring revenue each month for every new subscriber recruited through their application.
Also developers can earn revenue each time someone purchases and downloads an MP3 file from the service.
Through the
Rdio Affiliate Program developers can earn from between 2% and 7% for purchases made within a 30-day cookie window.
Having an API affiliate program seems like a logical way to incentivize developers to build applications.
An API owner should have an established monetization strategy for their API, and it should outline how revenue will be generated.
Having a way to track and attribute sales to your API developers makes a lot of sense, and sharing revenue with developers will ensure they will keep building new ways to attract users to a service via the API.
