You don’t buy placement here. You earn it.
The Laneworks network reaches the people who build, govern, and buy APIs — the readers of API Evangelist, APIs.io, API Commons, and APIs.json. It is no longer for sale.
There is no rate card on this page any more, and there are no ad tiers to pick from. Placement now goes to organizations doing the thing this whole network exists to measure: publishing an API surface good enough to lead their market. If you want to be in the rotation, the route is to get to the top of a Market Report — or to commission the one that scores your market.
Everything else stays exactly as it was. Every ad is text — a small label, one sentence, a link. No cookies, no third-party trackers, no auction. And every impression, click and CTR is public, on the analytics page and through the API.
Pay-for-play was always slightly at odds with the rest of what I do. I score API providers in public, on a rubric anyone can read, and then sold the space next to those scores to whoever wanted it. Those two things pulled against each other.
So the inventory now follows the score. The organizations promoted across this network are the ones investing in the things the Kin Score actually measures — publishing a fetchable contract, documenting scopes and security, shipping an agent surface, being legible to a machine. That is worth promoting whether or not anyone pays me, and it means a placement here says something. A paid one never did.
The top two providers in every published Market Report are in the ad inventory automatically. Not a package, not a negotiation — it is read straight from the report’s own scored cohort, so the list changes when the scores do.
- A placement across the network, linking to your provider profile
- A Leader Short on YouTube for the provider topping the market
- Social activity behind both
Standards bodies, regulators and trade associations are excluded. Topping a table you are not competing in is not leadership.
If your market has not been scored yet, fund the research that scores it. A Custom Market Report covers a market nobody has measured; a Custom Insights Report reads a single enterprise account from both sides.
- You enter the ad inventory when the report publishes
- A Leader Short and social support come with it
- The findings are still not negotiable — see below
Both are $5,000. Commissioning the research does not commission the conclusion.
Free, and always has been. If you are doing something interesting with APIs, that is the conversation. You cannot buy your way onto it — and you do not need to.
A good conversation usually turns into a story or two on API Evangelist, and stories get promoted across the same network. Most of what runs here started as somebody talking to me.
The people I actually work alongside in this space get real inventory, not leftovers — API operations communities, the practitioners running workshops and events, the people doing work I already point readers at.
This is not a tier you apply to. It comes out of working together on something, which is the pattern behind every other route on this page too.
- One format: text — a label, one sentence, a call to action, and a URL. It renders as a full-width notice, a stacked notice in sidebars, or an edge-to-edge announcement bar, styled to match the page it runs on. Nothing to design, nothing to resize, and it reads the same on a phone.
- Change the words any time — copy is a line in a config file, not a re-rendered creative.
- Public measurement — impressions, clicks, and CTR, per domain and per slot, on the analytics page and the API. No trackers, no cookies. That was the differentiator when this was sold, and it is still the differentiator now that it is not.
- Where the value actually is — the network serves over a million impressions a month, but most of that is high-reach, low-intent catalog traffic on APIs.io. The inventory that converts is the human traffic on apievangelist.com, at roughly ~1.7% CTR. The public numbers tell you which is which.
This network is not a neutral auction and does not pretend to be. Inventory is filled in a fixed order, and the shares are enforced in the ad server rather than left to whatever the rotation happens to do:
- My own products and properties first. The research, the catalog, the tools. This network exists first to sell my own work, and the majority of impressions will always go there.
- Market leaders second. The top two providers in every published Market Report, generated from each report’s own scored cohort. This is the inventory that cannot be bought.
- Partners third. The people I work alongside, with real inventory rather than whatever is left over.
- Prior commitments last. Placements sold before this page changed keep running for their term. Nothing new is being sold.
Saying this out loud is the point. You can see exactly what shares the page with you, and the public numbers tell you what it did.
Download the one-page media card (PDF) Everything below on a single page, for forwarding internally.
Branding is no longer a line item. Network placement, newsletter mentions and sponsored social are what comes with the work — leading your market, commissioning research, or partnering. The commissioned work below is real work with a real cost, and it is quoted and invoiced.
| Branding — earned, not sold | ||
|---|---|---|
| Network placement (all slots, all sites) | Earned | how |
| Newsletter — API Evangelist (weekly) | Earned | how |
| Newsletter — APIs.io Demand Report (weekly) | Earned | how |
| Sponsored social | Earned | how |
| Leader Short (YouTube) | Earned | how |
| Thought leadership | ||
| Podcast conversation | Free | ask |
| Custom article | $1,500 | quote |
| Event coverage | $5,000 | quote |
| Content package (6 stories) | $7,000 | quote |
| Demand generation | ||
| Custom Market Report (scores a market nobody has measured) | $5,000 | quote |
| Custom Insights Report (one enterprise account, both sides) | $5,000 | quote |
| Custom white paper | $7,500 | quote |
| Custom eBook | $15,000 | quote |
A commissioned report is paid research, not a paid finding. You fund the work of scoring a market or an account; what the evidence says when it is scored is not yours to set, and it goes out under the same public rubric as everything else. If that is a problem, this is the wrong shop.
Commissioned work is distinct from the published research, which is my own product line and is priced separately — a published Market Report is $500 to buy. Commissioning one means paying for a market to be researched and scored that nobody has covered yet.
Tell me what you are working on. If you want to know where you currently stand, your score is already in the catalog and the rubric is public — both free, and the fastest way to see what it would take to top your market.
Kin Lane · API Evangelist