UK Audience Body Barb Upgrades its API

UK ad currency body Barb has launched the third phase of its API, developed by RSMB and promising faster outputs, new programme and spot reach endpoints, and full integration with the Barb Data Hub.

What began as the Broadcasters' Audience Research Board became Barb Audiences in 2023, reflecting the continued extension of its measurement beyond broadcasting, to include VOD streamers and video-sharing platforms. The organisation's hybrid approach combines people-based panel data with census-level online viewing data, to provide a picture of total viewing across platforms. Its first API - free to its full licensees - was launched in January 2023 and then updated in September that year. The body appointed RSMB to deliver the third phase, in January.

Barb says in addition to retaining all its existing functionality, phase 3.0 adds 'three core enhancements': significantly faster response times and more reliability; new programme and spot reach endpoints, provided through rapid reach calculations; and integration with the Barb Data Hub, which forms its foundational data source and cloud platform. API 3.0 operates within it and pulls all data from it to ensure consistency of output.

'Version three of the Barb API is an important element of Barb's data distribution strategy,' says Khaled El Serafy (pictured), Barb's Director of Data and Technology. 'Our aim is to make Barb data more accessible, offering the industry choice in how Barb data can be ingested quickly, reliably, and in a ready-to-use format. We will continue to work to update the API based on our users' feedback, along with exploring cloud data shares and agentic AI as parallel future-focused data distribution systems.'

The API is free to access for Barb underwriters and clients with a full licence. Barb is online at www.barb.co.uk .

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.