I wondered why too, so I reverted the commit that added the add, pulled in some PRs, and pushed it here. I plan to keep it up to date if there's any interest. https://notabug.org/anomie/public-apis

Thanks for doing something about this. I’ve bookmarked your fork of the project for future use. That ad was obnoxious and completely gratuitous – unlike the more tasteful Digital Ocean logo at the bottom of https://api.publicapis.org/ and the README page for https://github.com/davemachado/public-api In this case, it’s justifiable as it’s clear that Digital Ocean provide hosting for operating the API server.

I just went through the process of submitting the Canadian Football League's API and the process was structured enough - TravisCI tests to ensure a consistent documentation style - that I don't mind seeing the repo maintainer compensated for their efforts.

I post on Twitter a lot but I don't get a cut of their revenue.

I'll acknowledge this is a pretty good zing! But I do see some difference between the two examples.

These Github listicles have a history of being collaborative efforts by developers, in order to crowdsource a high-quality source of information on some kind of topic. To have the maintainer turn around and monetize the work of others, AFTER those others already submitted their contributions, seems kinda dishonest to me. With Twitter, you (sorta) know what you're signing up for, given that you agree to EULA, privacy policy and whatnot in order to register an account.

The repo owner runs the website sponsoring the list.

Fine, so put sponsored ads on the website that you're running. Just pretty please don't put them in the README :)