For businesses around the globe, the internet is a great thing. It’s a vast universe of information, knowledge and data. And, like the universe, it seems to be ever-growing.
But while that’s obviously advantageous for businesses – the more information there is, the more avenues you can take to grow your company – it’s also a little bit of a nuisance. If you own your own business, how many times have you tried to collect information, only to find yourself drowning in datasets, trying desperately to find out which ones actually apply to you?
Sure, the internet has a lot of useful data. But the ocean has a lot of angelfish. Throwing in a 100-mile-long net will pick up some of them, but it’ll also pick up about a million fish that you weren’t looking for.
The Power of News API
This is why News APIs have become so popular over the last few years. For the unenlightened, API – which stands for application programming interface – is a tool that allows applications to communicate with commercial news sources, scanning, extracting, analyzing and enriching data.
You might be thinking: hold on, I already have that! It’s called a prepackaged dataset!
Well, yes, but actually no. Many businesses in 2023 are choosing between a news API or ready datasets because they are different. While a free prepackaged dataset will consolidate and cover a wide range of news sources, they are free for a reason, and that’s because of the amount of time and money teams will have to spend cleaning and preparing the data for AI and ML models.
A news API, however, is powered by AI, and it uses natural language processing and machine learning to understand certain topics, categories, sentiments, dates, events, and more, before delivering the contextual metadata in a standardized format.
What This Means for You
There are many reasons to collect data, but predominantly, you’re doing so to get news that will be insightful for you and your business as a whole. But as with any business, it’s all about time and cost. A news API can drastically save the time and money that goes into gleaning relevant data from a free package, giving you a way to access news in real-time – as opposed to the limited historical data that many free datasets offer – and accumulate your own, individual newsfeed.
But, hey, you’re your own person. There are benefits to both free ready datasets and news APIs. For instance, free datasets can fit specific use cases, and teams who can get by without needing to organise their data. You can also get some suppliers who will provide useful advice and information on how to properly utilise a set, teaching consumers to understand and take the information who have never done so before.
But if you want better data, which is more organized, higher quality, more customizable, and leads to better scalability, then news APIs are probably worth looking into. As we mentioned before, the ocean is large. So, you need the right equipment to angle it.
