I built a small paid API this week and the interesting part was not the API. It

was finding out, by measurement, which data people actually pay for.

What I measured

There is a marketplace for x402-paid APIs with real buyer traffic, so I pulled

the per-resource settlement statistics for 600 of its listings. Of those, 207

(34.5%) had actual 30-day settlements . The rest were catalog entries nobody

pays for.

Then I looked at what the paying resources were about:

Cluster Tags on resources with real 30-day settlements

holidays / calendar / dates 15 / 15 / 14

audiobooks / librivox / mp3 16 / 16 / 16

crypto / defi / base 12 / 6 / 12

Holidays and dates were at the top of the list of things with money behind them.

Not DNS. Not security headers.…