The Onion Maximizes Advertising Inventory by Improving Site Performance of 50% and Eliminating Site Downtime
Customer Company Size
Mid-size Company
Region
- America
Country
- United States
Product
- CDNetworks Content Acceleration
- CDNetworks Video-On-Demand
Tech Stack
- Content Delivery Network (CDN)
- Cloud Security DDoS protection
- Web application firewall
Implementation Scale
- Enterprise-wide Deployment
Impact Metrics
- Revenue Growth
- Customer Satisfaction
- Productivity Improvements
Technology Category
- Networks & Connectivity - Network Management & Analysis Software
Applicable Functions
- Sales & Marketing
- Business Operation
Services
- Cloud Planning, Design & Implementation Services
- Cybersecurity Services
About The Customer
The Onion is a satirical news organization founded in 1988 and headquartered in New York, NY. Starting in 2006, The Onion made a concerted effort to establish www.TheOnion.com as its main media outlet. With heavy promotion and the 2007 launch of its online video series, TheOnion.com site quickly grew in popularity and has transformed the company. Today, the site serves award-winning news, videos, and 40-million page views to more than 8 million unique visitors each month, making it the most popular news organization in its class. The Onion has developed a loyal subscriber base, which plays a key role in spreading the word about ‘America’s Finest News Source.’
The Challenge
In 2006, The Onion's rapid growth in subscribers and site visits began to strain its infrastructure, leading to significant and unpredictable downtime. This downtime drastically reduced The Onion’s ability to sell ad inventory, negatively impacting both business planning and revenue. The Onion initially leveraged the services of two content delivery networks (CDNs). However, the primary CDN caused a site outage and its help desk staff lacked the highly qualified engineers needed to quickly bring The Onion’s site back online. This could have severely damaged The Onion’s brand just as it was gaining popularity. The primary CDN also took up to two days to provision new services and site features.
The Solution
Having already worked closely with CDNetworks as its secondary CDN provider, The Onion IT team knew that CDNetworks could satisfy all its functional requirements. And having witnessed the CDN’s performance for whole site delivery, it decided to assign primary CDN responsibilities to CDNetworks. Since switching to CDNetworks, The Onion has experienced 100% website uptime and 50% performance gains, including average page download time of 75 milliseconds. CDNetworks proactively raises potential site issues. The Onion interfaces with senior engineers who are true subject matter experts. The company is constantly innovating technology and adding features. And its instant self-provisioning tool has made The Onion’s lives so much easier. In fact, CDNetworks’ tool has reduced The Onion’s average provisioning time from two days down to just two hours.
Operational Impact
Quantitative Benefit
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