Boosting Advertising Revenue for Publishers and Bloggers: A Case Study on Breaktime and Google Cloud

Breaktime is a data consulting firm based in Taiwan, founded in 2017. The company provides services to bloggers and publishers to help them generate advertising revenue. They operate the Zi Media Network and the Zi Power Ads AI advertising allocation system, which aims to simplify the use of 'supply-side platforms' for publishers to sell digital advertising impressions via automated auctions. Breaktime's goal is to help publishers and 'internet celebrities' reduce the manual work involved in using supply-side platforms, help them price advertising impressions more effectively, and increase overall revenue.

Breaktime, a Taiwan-based company founded in 2017, provides data consulting services to bloggers and publishers to generate advertising revenue. The company operates the Zi Media Network and the Zi Power Ads AI advertising allocation system. The goal of Zi Power Ads AI is to simplify the use of 'supply-side platforms' for publishers to sell digital advertising impressions via automated auctions. However, Breaktime faced challenges with their initial infrastructure. They launched Zi Power Ads AI on infrastructure in an internet data center in Taiwan and then moved to a cloud infrastructure provider to support increasing traffic volumes. However, they encountered reliability and stability issues, including virtual machine shutdowns that prevented Zi Power Ads AI from being available to publishers for extended periods. This led Breaktime to evaluate other providers.

Breaktime compared multinational cloud service providers and found Google Cloud to be the best fit for their requirements for scalability, managed application containerization, data warehousing, analytics, visualization, and access to advanced machine learning services. They engaged Taiwan-based Google Cloud Partner iKala to provide architecture consultancy services and overviews of Google Cloud services for the migration. Breaktime migrated Zi Power Ads AI to a Google Cloud architecture comprising Google Kubernetes Engine, BigQuery for data warehousing and analysis with Looker Studio providing reports and visualization, and Stackdriver to monitor applications and infrastructure. Cloud Load Balancing, integrated with the Cloud CDN content delivery network, enables the business to scale its compute resources in line with demand peaks and troughs. Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) enables Breaktime to secure individual nodes and minimize exposure of its environment to the public internet. Breaktime also uses TensorFlow, an open source library of machine learning and deep learning models, to perform natural language processing for content categorization.

• The migration to Google Cloud has powered Breaktime into a leadership position in 'long tail' advertising, a strategy used by publishers to target a range of niche markets. The system now covers the browsing behavior of about 8 million users across Taiwan, more than 1.6 billion ad impressions, and over 1,300 unique domains. Breaktime has become one of the largest partners of publishers in Taiwan, helping them grow revenues, reduce operational costs, and lower the barriers to entry into new markets and segments. The success with Google Cloud has spurred Breaktime to undertake proofs of concept of TensorFlow machine learning models for picture extraction and Cloud Vision to classify and label images.

• Achieves 99.99%-plus availability

• Supports an average of 10 million page views per day

• Enables analysis of 10,000 blogs and article pages per day