As the leading service provider for many of the world’s most successful social media sites, Akamai Technologies (NASDAQ: AKAM) is constantly innovating to provide technology solutions that allow customers to expand, innovate and offer unique capabilities to their end-users. Akamai’s extensive experience with social networking and user-generated content companies has created a unique solution that addresses the technology challenges inherent in this industry.
In an industry ripe for continued growth and competitive innovation comes an abundance of technology challenges and opportunities, including delivering and accelerating significant amounts of unique and dynamic content; supporting unprecedented levels of Web site traffic and incorporating techniques to monetize social networking sites. There are also challenges with incorporating higher quality video, rich Internet applications, and multimedia features to attract site visitors and contribute to a higher quality user experience. Akamai’s unique social media acceleration technology and rich media delivery capabilities have proven successful in helping customers overcome these evolving challenges so they can build strong audiences and in turn, ad revenues.
The Akamai Difference
“By freeing companies from scalability and infrastructure constraints, Akamai allows sites to flourish unencumbered—to experiment with new services and promotions, to fully capitalize on unplanned growth or successes, and to grow the business at any pace, without high up-front capital costs,” said Tim Napoleon, Chief Strategist, Media and Entertainment at Akamai. “By offering the best possible site and upload performance, Akamai enables social networking companies to enhance their customer experience with features that are ever more compelling, personalized and media rich.”
Because of the unique nature of the content they make available, social networking sites face a number of challenges that standard content delivery networks (CDNs) may not address. Many CDNs, including those with limited geographic distribution, serve web pages directly from a customer’s origin server, and serve objects from the same centralized server network, reducing performance and reliability improvement opportunities. In contrast, Akamai’s proprietary software configures to handle all types of content intelligently – whether infrequently viewed, popular, or even dynamic. Akamai’s social media site acceleration technology takes a holistic approach to accelerating the entire site, leveraging the right technology to fit each content type from dynamic site and file upload acceleration to large file optimization for larger files, such as video.
Social Media Site Acceleration
Social networking sites store and receive enormous amounts of user-generated media, most of which is infrequently viewed, reducing the ability to offload or cache that content. In order to avoid costly infrastructure build outs, companies need to find a way to avoid round trips back to their own servers to retrieve content. Akamai’s global platform is unique in that it can configure these sites to achieve high offload rates while easily scaling to support the massive amounts of content and traffic characteristic of the social networking phenomenon.
Dynamic pages—such as search results pages loaded with thumbnails or highly-personalized home pages on social networking sites—present a special challenge to CDNs that rely on ‘caching’ of frequently viewed or static content such as images to optimize delivery because it is more difficult to cache or store. In addition, innovative, rich Internet applications created with technologies like AJAX or Adobe FLEX are becoming more common. Because of their dynamic nature, these applications can potentially cause slower response times and performance issues for end-users. Akamai’s proprietary Social media site acceleration technology uses Akamai Dynamic Site Accelerator to alleviate these performance challenges, accelerating dynamic pages and rich applications. This acceleration can increase page views and generate incremental premium advertising revenues. For rich, dynamic content, Akamai’s Dynamic Site Accelerator provides significantly faster load times for pages that are customized per user and per view, increasing consumption and improving audience loyalty.
Tagged.com, an Akamai customer leveraging the Dynamic Site Accelerator solution, is a leading social networking web site with over 60 million members worldwide. Akamai’s Social Media site acceleration technology helped Tagged improve page load times by as much as 150% domestically in the United States and by as much at 400% internationally.
“Great site performance is a key part of cultivating a loyal community and building a strong audience which is critical to our business success. Site usage increased immediately by 2% for every 100 milliseconds of latency removed,” said Johann Schleier-Smith, Chief Technology Officer at Tagged. “Accelerating the base page delivery let us get a jump on delivering all the rest of the content on the page. Once we made this switch, we found that users consumed considerably more content on our site. We are very pleased with this result, which offers important value to site advertisers and directly impacts our bottom line.”
Akamai User Generated Content Acceleration
In the case of social networking sites, users are uploading videos, photos and slideshows, and other large files and applications with growing frequency. When uploading files, there are inherent challenges due to slower upstream bandwidth connections, which can bottleneck the user experience. Akamai’s Fast File Upload, in conjunction with Dynamic Site Accelerator’s features, enables end users to quickly and reliably upload large files such as videos and photos with improved performance, reliability and availability. Akamai NetStorage can be used as the upload repository instead of a customer’s origin infrastructure to provide high on-demand scalability of uploads. Akamai’s ability to accelerate this process is of increasing importance, affecting the overall user experience as well as bottom line business impact.
The Akamai Difference for Social Networking
Akamai delivers a platform for expansion, innovation and exploration, enabling the world’s leading social media companies to succeed. Social media organizations rely on Akamai to overcome business and technical challenges associated with delivering, storing, and managing significant amounts of unique and dynamic content, as well as supporting unprecedented levels of Web site traffic. Akamai provides instant infrastructure for upload, download and delivery of content and application acceleration, enabling them to focus on their core business. For more information, please visit http://www.akamai.com/socialnetworking
Akamai Statement Under the Private Securities Litigation Reform Act
The release contains information about future expectations, plans and prospects of Akamai Technologies, Inc.'s management that constitute forward-looking statements for purposes of the safe harbor provisions under The Private Securities Litigation Reform Act of 1995. Actual results may differ materially from those indicated by these forward-looking statements as a result of various important factors including, but not limited to, the effects of any unexpected difficulty in closing our financial books for the quarter and other factors that are discussed in the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K, quarterly reports on Form 10-Q, and other documents periodically filed with the SEC