Intelligent Solutions for the Social Web

Intelligent Solutions for the Social Web Accelerating Growth, Innovation and Profitability with Akamai Table of Contents EXECUTIVE SUMMARY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 THE SOCIAL NETWORKING LANDSCAPE . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2 UNIQUE CHALLENGES FOR SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4 Scaling the Business While Controlling Costs Driving Revenue Growth Innovation and Differentiation 4 4 5 AKAMAI’S OPTIMIZED SOLUTIONS FOR SOCIAL NETWORKING SITES . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 6 Instant Scalability with Reduced Infrastructure Costs Scalability without Constraint Cost Reductions through High Offload Rates Instant Infrastructure for Maximum Flexibility Controlling Video Costs while Improving the User Experience Performance Pays: Delivering the Best User Experience Accelerating Social Media Accelerating User Uploads Accelerating Video Delivery The Freedom to Innovate Intelligence in the Network Reporting & Analytics: Knowledge and Insight 6 7 7 8 8 9 10 11 11 12 12 13 WHY COMPANIES CHOOSE AKAMAI . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 14 2 Executive Summary SOCIAL NETWORKING IS THE FASTEST GROWING, MOST DYNAMIC SEGMENT OF THE INTERNET TODAY. Adoption of social networks has skyrocketed in recent years—visitors now log hundreds of millions of hours per month on social sites, whose popularity has turned them into critical channels for both understanding and influencing public opinion on every topic from soft drinks to movies to presidential campaigns. Rapid growth, rapid change and intense competition define the industry. Given the wildly viral nature of social media, no one can predict where the next big success will come from, what the next killer app will be. Social networks need the ability to innovate freely, adapt quickly, and capitalize on every success—no matter how sudden or unexpected. Because of this, choosing the right technical foundation is critical to success. The right foundation enables sites to experiment liberally and adopt the latest technologies, while the wrong one impedes innovation. The right one allows sites to scale on demand; the wrong one hampers growth. The right technical foundation offers a superior customer experience and a competitive edge; the wrong one frustrates visitors and drives away potential users. The right one maximizes revenue potential; the wrong one burdens sites with planning nightmares and high capital costs. This whitepaper helps social networking sites understand the impact of their technology and infrastructure choices within the context of fundamental business and technical challenges: scaling the business while controlling costs, driving audience and revenue growth, and continuing to innovate and differentiate in a dynamic, competitive environment. Akamai helps social media companies overcome these key challenges with industry-focused solutions built upon the EdgePlatform—a unique platform for driving online innovation, experimentation, and growth. GROWTH IN AGGREGATE BANDWIDTH DELIVERED BY AKAMAI FOR SOCIAL MEDIA SITES Mbps SOCIAL NETWORKING’S SIZZLE: In 2007, the Akamai network saw an increase of over 500% in traffic pushed by social networking sites (in aggregate) with peak traffic hitting over 130 Mbps. 1/07 6/07 12/07 Intelligent Solutions for the Social Web: Accelerating Growth, Innovation and Profitability with Akamai 3 The Social Networking Landscape The social networking industry is growing with unprecedented speed, with sites attracting hundreds of millions of loyal users into their communities over the last few years. As of September 2007, social networking sites rank as 3 of top 5 sites worldwide by page view and 4 of the 5 fastest growing sites by unique visitor count.1,2 It’s not just users who have shown extreme interest Facebook, with its $15 billion valuation a mere four years after inception, is but one example of the intense level of attention and investment this fast changing marketplace has attracted in the last couple years. The biggest challenge now facing social networking sites is retaining and monetizing their core asset—specifically, their audience and the rich social graph that connects them. While they experiment with ways to leverage the viral effects of social media, sites must continually focus on ways to boost ad CPMs as well as increasing traffic to increase the number of ads served. Competition is intense and the rules keep changing. Some of the broadest recent trends include the following: Widgetization May 2007 marked the beginning of a meteoric rise in the use of widgets, as Facebook opened up its platform, allowing widget developers to monetize their applications, with several other major sites announcing they would soon follow suit. Google’s OpenSocial initiative raised the stakes again, as a coalition of social sites, including industry leader MySpace, agreed to support standard APIs for application development. These developments pave the way for virtually limitless innovation of sticky, viral applications that integrate user profiles, preferences, friends and activities along with innovative services ranging from interactive video skins to visually-based search to the yet unknown. The speed of growth in widget use easily rivals that of the social networks themselves; top ranking Facebook applications, for example, have reached anywhere from 10 to 20 million installs within a few short months.3 Just as social networking sites provide widgets with a viral platform for adoption, the rise of widget development helps boost the growth of the social networking sites, by creating more sticky, engaging visitor experiences. According to Compete, third party applications account for over a third of Facebook’s growth in the three months after Facebook opened up its platform.4 1 The biggest challenge now facing social networking sites is retaining and monetizing their core asset—their communities comScore World Metrix as cited by the Wall Street Journal. (Oct 19, 2007) hsmarketer.com/Article. aspx?id=1005542&xsrc=article_head_sitesearchx Compete. http://blog.compete.com/topics/compete-top-10/ (September 2007 2 Intelligent Solutions for the Social Web: Accelerating Growth, Innovation and Profitability with Akamai 4 Video Hot on the heels of YouTube’s meteoric rise, video has proven itself as a driver of traffic and advertising revenues, with all of the major networking sites incorporating video into their core strategies to varying degrees. Videos are viral—with viewership rising fast and video overlay advertisements generating 5 to 10 times more clicks than traditional banner ads. Both eMarketer and Forrester predict large increases in online video ads in the next several years, with Forrester forecasting a 72% year-over-year growth to $7.1 billion in 2012.5,6 Global Growth Although the top sites are based in the U.S., social networking is clearly a global phenomenon. According to comScore, Asia is in fact the largest and fastest growing region for social networking.7 Hitwise recently reported that visits to social networking sites in the U.K. have just overtaken visits to web-based email sites like Gmail, Yahoo, and Hotmail.8 Meanwhile, social networking site visitors from Latin America are the most engaged, spending, on average, nearly twice as much time per month at the sites than the average visitor worldwide. The next few years undoubtedly hold even more change as social networking becomes increasingly integrated into users’ daily lives. In this highly competitive space, companies must prove viability not only with scalability but with profitability. They need innovation and agility to succeed—a technological infrastructure that allows them to scale, adapt, and differentiate their communities, while offering the best user experience possible and keeping costs firmly under control. The next few years undoubtedly hold even more change as social networking becomes increasingly integrated into users’ daily lives. 3 4 5 Extrapolated from data reported by Adonomics. http://adonomics.com/leaderboard.php (Retrieved December 2007) Compete. http://blog.compete.com/2007/10/09/facebook-applications-community-next-conference/ (October 2007) Miguel Helft, “Google Aims to Make YouTube Profitable With Ads,” New York Times. http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/22/technology/22google. html (August 22, 2007) Forrester Research. “US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2007 To 2012.” (October 2007) comScore. http://www.comscore.com/blog/2007/10/consumer_trends_in_social_netw.html (October 2007) HitWise. http://weblogs.hitwise.com/robin-goad/2007/11/social_networks_overtake_webma.html (November 2007) 6 7 8 Intelligent Solutions for the Social Web: Accelerating Growth, Innovation and Profitability with Akamai 5 Unique Challenges for Social Networking Sites As participants in a fierce and rapidly changing marketplace, social networking sites face a number of unique challenges tied to their technology and infrastructure choices. Understanding how their technological foundation impacts these business challenges is critical to success. Scaling the Business While Controlling Costs For social networking sites, success is marked by huge growth—usually fast and unpredictable. MySpace reached 20 million users in just over 2 years. YouTube reached the same number in just 16 months.9 Meanwhile, niche players and newer entrants are still showing growth rates of anywhere from a few hundred to a thousand percent a year.10 Dealing with such rapid-fire success can be a huge challenge in itself. Big increases in traffic and user-generated content (UGC) make it challenging to maintain site performance and availability. Traditional infrastructure build out requires significant time, capital expenditure, and management overhead, as well as the ability to forecast capacity needs. But since companies don’t know when or how quickly their sites will take off, they need to have a cost effective way to support fast, unplanned growth. Furthermore, within social networking sites’ highly connected communities, hot content can spread like wildfire, igniting instant “swarms” or “flash crowds” that can swamp a site, causing performance to reach unacceptable lows or fail completely. Infrastructure that enables sites to handle such traffic spikes without degrading performance—and without costly overprovisioning—allows social networks to fully capitalize on their own success, rather than buckle under its strain. Dealing with rapid-fire success can be a huge challenge in itself. 9 Compete. http://blog.compete.com/2006/10/18/youtube-vsmyspace-growth-google-charts-metrics/ (October 2007) Extrapolated from a variety of sources including comScore, MediaMetrix, and Compete. (October 2007) Forrester Research. “US Interactive Marketing Forecast, 2007 To 2012 (October 2007) 10 11 Driving Revenue Growth With their massively linked communities and highly engaged audiences, social networks present a substantial advertising opportunity. Marketing possibilities range from basic, targeted banner ads to viral, profile-based widgets; from user generated buzz to yet-to-be dreamed up scenarios for leveraging profiles, communities and relationships. The potential is huge. eMarketer predicts that worldwide social networking advertising spend will increase more than ten-fold in the next five years to $6.9 billion by 2012.11 And no matter what models of advertising win out in the end, the ability of sites to attract and retain users is paramount. This means sites need to deliver the best possible user experience—offering rich, personalized multi-media interactions without the wait: fast interactive pages, high quality video viewing, speedy UGC uploads. Moreover, since display advertising accounts for the vast majority of current social networking revenues, improvements in site performance also have a more immediate effect on revenues, as increased page views lead to more ad impressions. Indeed, performance and site execution are mission critical: whereas strong site performance drives revenue and audience growth, slow site performance increases the likelihood of visitor abandonment and churn. Prolonged outages or periods of slow load times can turn into a public relations disaster, killing the momentum of a rapidly growing site. Improved Site Performance => Increased Page & Video Views => More Ad Impressions => GREATER AD REVENUE Intelligent Solutions for the Social Web: Accelerating Growth, Innovation and Profitability with Akamai 6 Forrester Research Forecast: US Marketing Spend on Social Media Sites, 2007 to 2012 $8,000 Social media $7,000 $6,000 Revenue potential for social marketing sites is predicted to grow to nearly $7 Billion by 2012 Marketing spend (US$ millions) $5,000 $4,000 $3,000 $2,000 $1,000 $0 2007 $600 2008 $1,500 2009 $2,625 2010 $3,938 2011 $5,316 2012 $6,610 Social Media (numbers have been rounded) Innovation and Differentiation “The best way to predict the future is to create it.” Legendary economist Peter Drucker’s words could not be more fitting. Social networking is where the cutting edge of the Internet, community, media, and marketing collide, and the leaders of this dynamic junction will shape social interactions for decades to come. In order to succeed in this dynamic environment, social networking companies need an infrastructure solution that gives them the freedom to drive their business in new, unexpected directions, reliably delivering their site to the community regardless of size, pace of growth, or popularity of content. Such an infrastructure differentiates them from competitors, offering a better, faster, rock-solid user experience while leveraging the latest in rich media applications and Web 2.0 technologies. Such an infrastructure grants the agility to capitalize on sudden successes and to expand without worry, so that companies can simply focus on their core mission—innovating, growing the business, and changing the world. Intelligent Solutions for the Social Web: Accelerating Growth, Innovation and Profitability with Akamai 7 Akamai’s Optimized Solutions for Social Networking Sites Akamai’s industry-focused solutions enable social networking sites to OVERCOME THESE CRITICAL BUSINESS CHALLENGES. Built on the unique EdgePlatform network, Akamai’s social media acceleration solutions outperform simple hosting companies and content delivery networks (CDNs) by delivering: • Instantaneous, cost-effective infrastructure that provides on-demand scalability and mission critical reliability for uploads and downloads—without high capital expenditures and IT overhead • Revenue and audience growth through a superior customer experience for all types of social networking content—from large video libraries to rich AJAX applications to long-tail user generated content. • A platform for innovation and differentiation that allows social media sites to experiment with and adopt the latest technologies quickly and costeffectively. We now take a closer look at how Akamai delivers these key benefits. Instant Scalability with Reduced Infrastructure Costs As social networking sites grow, scalability becomes a critical issue, both in terms of cost and in terms of maintaining availability for a rapidly growing user base. Building reliable storage solutions for hundreds of millions of pieces of UGC becomes expensive quickly, as does maintaining multiple data centers to deliver content to a rapidly growing user base. As sites struggle to serve a burgeoning global audience, the headaches only multiply; entering new markets can require significant up front factory costs of deploying data centers in foreign countries. Moreover, social networking sites can experience sudden, non-linear growth, making traditional capacity planning not only costly but essentially impossible. Infrastructure can quickly become the limiting factor to a site’s growth, causing it to lose potential audience members and immediate ad revenue opportunities. Akamai solves this problem by enabling social networking sites to leverage Akamai’s massive EdgePlatform network for content delivery. With 25,000 servers located across nearly 1000 networks in 70 countries worldwide, the EdgePlatform acts as an enormous, intelligent extension of the customer’s origin server, absorbing unplanned growth and instantaneous flash crowds without problem. In addition, Akamai eliminates both the time delay and the up front factory costs associated with entering new markets. With the EdgePlatform, social networking sites can leverage a global presence instantaneously. Akamai’s social media site acceleration solutions enable companies to control costs and improve performance, while providing a robust platform on which to innovate and build new audiences around the globe. Intelligent Solutions for the Social Web: Accelerating Growth, Innovation and Profitability with Akamai 8 SCALABILITY WITHOUT CONSTRAINT Currently, Akamai handles approximately 20% of global Web traffic on a regular basis, routinely serving over 40 million visitors per minute.12 With its massive available capacity and extensive customer experience, the Akamai network has proven its nearly limitless capacity to scale—handling everything from live streaming events like March Madness and the Olympics to high definition videos and full length television downloads—without disruption. This means social networking companies who leverage Akamai can confidently focus on building their business, without worrying about whether their infrastructure can keep up. 12 http://www.akamai.com/html/technology/dataviz3.html (December 2007) The massive EdgePlatform routinely powers one-fifth of the world’s online content and transactions. COST REDUCTIONS THROUGH HIGH OFFLOAD RATES Despite the fact that social networking sites host a vast footprint of user generated content, much of which is rarely accessed, Akamai’s intelligent global distribution network is still able to provide extremely high levels of origin server offloading. This dramatically reduces the need for Akamai customers to rely on their own infrastructure build outs, resulting in big savings in capital expenditures as well as maintenance costs. • MySpace offloads 98% of origin traffic onto Akamai, enjoying the benefit of global, on-demand scalability while avoiding the need to deploy servers internationally • Heavy.com offloads over 90% of origin traffic to Akamai, and flawlessly handled a 3X increase in traffic during the launch of a heavily dynamic, innovative Flash video player, without requiring any additional infrastructure build out. Intelligent Solutions for the Social Web: Accelerating Growth, Innovation and Profitability with Akamai 9 INSTANT INFRASTRUCTURE FOR MAXIMUM FLEXIBILITY Companies looking to completely avoid maintaining infrastructure and forego high capital expenditures can take advantage of an end-to-end global storage, upload and delivery solution by leveraging Akamai NetStorage, a geographically distributed, high availability storage solution that acts as a surrogate origin server. Available on demand, NetStorage gives social networking companies the freedom to grow their UGC libraries as quickly as they wish without advance planning, along with the ability to devote their time and money to innovation rather than infrastructure. NetStorage can handle thousands of simultaneous user uploads while managing replication and global availability for the content. AKAMAI INNOVATION: OFFLOADING LONG-TAIL SOCIAL NETWORKING CONTENT Social networking sites maintain a very large content footprint, most of which is “long-tail” or “cold” content, accessed by relatively few users. This presents a challenge for CDNs that are optimized for “traditional” web sites and expire cold content out of their caches. For social networks, this means a large percentage of content requests would be cache misses—meaning the content is not in cache, requiring a trip back to the origin server and eliminating any performance or offloading benefits the CDN could potentially provide. Akamai’s network is unique in its ability to handle long-tail social networking content, ensuring optimal performance and high cache hit rates through efficient use of cache space, intelligent local distribution of content, and a dynamic caching model that enables even cold content to enjoy the benefits of geographic distribution while hotter content remains as close to the edge of the network as possible. For example, Akamai has measured cache hit rates of: • 87% for an image-sharing site with 50 TB of storage containing 1.3 billion files • 94% for a site with 4 million media files using 12TB of storage These high cache hit rates translate directly into significant performance improvements for the end user, as well as sizable infrastructure cost savings for the social networking site. Akamai’s closed loop storage and delivery solution provides an instant, on demand social networking infrastructure CONTROLLING VIDEO COSTS WHILE IMPROVING THE USER EXPERIENCE As videos grow in popularity, bandwidth requirements surge—as do costs. The ability to control download speeds and buffer sizes can be a small but important factor in managing those costs and improving profit margins. Akamai cuts waste by monitoring audience connections and delivering only the portions of videos that users are watching. In addition, Akamai’s progressive seek feature allows users to jump to their point of interest in a video—without requiring the download of the entire file up to that point. This enables a much better end user experience and reduces user wait times, while further eliminating costs associated with wasted bandwidth. Intelligent Solutions for the Social Web: Accelerating Growth, Innovation and Profitability with Akamai 10 Performance Pays: Delivering the Best User Experience A social network’s most valuable asset is its audience—the highly engaged, highly connected communities that drive its site. But as an increasing number of sites vie for users’ limited attention, growing an audience becomes more difficult and retaining an audience becomes more vital. In order to succeed, sites must combine engaging content with fast performance to offer the best possible end user experience. Unfortunately these two goals are often at odds. High quality video, interactive Internet applications, rich multimedia features, and highly customizable pages attract and engage visitors. But as sites get richer and more dynamic, achieving good performance becomes an even greater challenge. Performance Pays: Fast-loading pages increase page view counts, which translate directly into more ad impressions, longer visits and increased revenue. “Great site performance is a key part of cultivating a loyal community and a building a strong audience which is critical to our business success. Site usage increased immediately by 1% for every 50 milliseconds of latency removed.” JOHANN SCHLEIER-SMITH, CHIEF TECHNOLOGY OFFICER, TAGGED.COM Akamai offers unique social media site acceleration capabilities that dramatically improve performance of both rich internet applications and dynamic HTML pages. Sites leveraging this technology differentiate themselves from the pack with an enhanced experience that boosts the number and duration of user visits, and translates directly into more ad impressions and increased revenue. In addition, a better user experience means a more sticky, engaged audience which is attractive to advertisers and can further boost revenue. • Heavy.com saw a 200-300% performance improvement with Akamai, translating to a 3X increase in page views • Friendster improved overall page performance by 33% and saw a corresponding 3X increase in page views The Akamai network is unique in its ability to speed performance for richly dynamic social networking sites. Most CDNs have a limited geographic distribution, hampering their ability to provide significant performance and reliability improvements. In contrast, the Akamai’s massive edge network delivers content from close to end users, offering the fastest download speeds possible for audiences around the globe. By improving audience loyalty and revenues, these performance boosts will help drive the Social Web to profitability. MySpace sees page download times that are 2.6X faster in US and 6X faster internationally when using Akamai. Intelligent Solutions for the Social Web: Accelerating Growth, Innovation and Profitability with Akamai 11 ACCELERATING SOCIAL MEDIA Because social networks are focused on creating a rich, interactive, and highly customized user experience, a significant amount of traffic consists of uncacheable content, such as AJAX or other Web 2.0 applications, personalized home pages, search results, and content that is simply too cold to cache. Through Dynamic Site Accelerator (DSA), Akamai offers unique social media site acceleration technologies that increase the speed and reliability for this type of content—content that cannot be accelerated by typical CDNs providing only caching capabilities. While each dynamic request still does go back to the origin server, DSA leverages route, connection, and application optimization technologies to offer improved response time and a reduction in download errors, reducing user abandonment as well as wasted resources from retry requests. More importantly, the visitor experience is significantly improved, boosting user engagement and retention. AKAMAI INNOVATION: UNIQUE TECHNOLOGIES FOR SOCIAL MEDIA ACCELERATION How do you accelerate uncacheable content that must traverse the long haul Internet? Akamai does this by finding better paths across the Internet and by reducing the number of back and forth trips it takes to communicate the information. Here are some of the technologies involved: • Route optimization. Akamai’s unique route optimization technology monitors real time Internet conditions to identify better paths over the long haul Internet. By leveraging the massive Akamai network and incorporating live congestion information into its route calculations, route optimization can offer speed ups of 30-50% over the default Internet route and boosts performance even more for international traffic, which typically crosses through regions of poor connectivity. • Connection optimization. Akamai further speeds data transmission by reducing the number of required round trips between origin server and end user, making efficient use of persistent TCP connections and tuning TCP parameters to reduce chattiness and improve throughput and latency. • Page download optimization. Akamai’s edge servers will parse dynamic HTML pages to identify and retrieve embedded objects while the base page is being delivered to the end user. These objects are thus ready for immediate delivery to the nearby end user, minimizing the time it takes for his browser to display the full page. • Content compression. Intelligent content compression can further speed the long haul transmission of content. Text and HTML objects benefit the most, often shrinking to one-tenth the original size. Network Performance Comparison Akamai’s Route Optimization is unique in its ability to accelererate dynamic, interactive Social Networking content Intelligent Solutions for the Social Web: Accelerating Growth, Innovation and Profitability with Akamai 12 ACCELERATING VIDEO DELIVERY By using Akamai, VideoEgg offers its global users upload times that are 5 times faster, while offering high performance delivery of over 25 million videos a day—with traffic reaching as much as 8 Gbps. ACCELERATING USER UPLOADS As part of enjoying a responsive site, social networking users expect to be able to quickly and easily upload their own photos, videos, and other files. A smooth experience drives adoption, while slow, error-prone uploads frustrate users and cause abandonment. Unfortunately, just as with web site and video delivery, building a high performance, scalable upload and storage infrastructure for UGC is challenging and costly. Akamai’s Fast File Upload module solves this problem by offering sites a high-performance infrastructure for distributed end users to quickly and reliably upload files to NetStorage or the customer’s origin site. Users are mapped in real time to edge upload servers, vastly improving upload performance and availability. The users’ content is then accelerated to the appropriate storage site using Akamai DSA’s path routing and connection optimization technologies. Through Fast File Upload, companies can secure and control uploads, including supporting uploads over SSL, setting restrictions on who can upload a file, and enforcing limitations on what size, type and number of files a user can upload. When used in conjunction with NetStorage, Fast File Upload offers a fully outsourced UGC upload and storage solution that offers instantaneous scalability. End users enjoy a speedy and smooth upload experience, while businesses enjoy on-demand capacity with the ability to support simultaneous, distributed user uploads of any nearly any magnitude— without the need for capital expenditure or advance planning. According to JupiterResearch, the two greatest sources of frustration for online video watchers are slow-starting playback and interruptions due to buffering. Sixty percent of regular online video users are less likely to return to a site for video content if they encounter poor viewing experiences such as these.13 By delivering video content from edge servers, close to end users, Akamai minimizes network latency and congestion issues, enabling social networks to offer high quality video with fast playback startup, minimal buffering delays, and a glitch-free, jitter-free viewing experience. In addition, Akamai’s DSA solution works in conjunction with video delivery to shorten video start times and improve the end user experience even further. DSA accelerates delivery of the dynamic base page for a video, so the user enjoys an even faster startup for video playback. This allows video providers to make the most of the critical first few seconds that can make all the difference between a captive viewer and an abandoned download attempt. 13 JupiterResearch. Report commissioned by Akamai. “The Importance of Delivering a Great Online Video Experience.” (July 2007) http://www.akamai.com/dl/reports/jupiter_ onlinevideoexp.pdf AKAMAI INNOVATION: IMPROVING PERFORMANCE THROUGH DNS EFFICIENCY Because social networks have such large content libraries, many CDNs require these sites to partition their content onto multiple hostnames, which can negatively impact both end user performance and origin site DNS load. In contrast, Akamai’s network efficiently handles content libraries of virtually unlimited size under a single hostname. This improves page load time by reducing the number of DNS lookups per page, and also dramatically cuts the burden on the origin site’s DNS infrastructure—as well as the DNS infrastructure of the Internet at large. Intelligent Solutions for the Social Web: Accelerating Growth, Innovation and Profitability with Akamai 13 The Freedom to Innovate Akamai offers a high performance architecture that enables businesses to adapt and innovate without constraint. By offering sites a unique, robust social media technology foundation, Akamai gives sites the freedom to innovate and succeed—to experiment with new services that will keep audiences engaged, to fully capitalize on unplanned successes, and to grow the business at any pace, without high up front capital costs. And 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—all while protecting that experience against the intrusion of malicious bots and unwanted spammers. “Akamai takes a proactive approach to understanding our applications and matching our needs to its technologies.” MIKE BRITTAIN, DIRECTOR OF APPLICATION DEVELOPMENT, HEAVY.COM INTELLIGENCE IN THE NETWORK By leveraging its unique status as an intelligent Internet overlay, the Akamai network delivers services and insight that no other vendor can provide The Akamai EdgePlatform represents hundreds of man-years of investment in infrastructure build out and R&D— the world’s largest distributed network, incorporating over 85 patented and patent-pending technologies in areas including distributed computing, real time traffic management, highly efficient caching, and dynamic content acceleration. The result is a network that has proven time and again its ability to provide unparalleled levels of performance, scalability, and reliability for Web content and transactions. Built to be fault tolerant and selfhealing at every level, the EdgePlatform also has the capability to handle each piece of content in a highly specified and optimal way, ensuring security, integrity and freshness of content along with performance. Sites maintain complete control using flexible content management tools that can integrate directly into their existing content management system. Moreover, by leveraging its unique status as an intelligent Internet overlay, the Akamai network delivers far more than content—it delivers services and insight that no other vendor can provide, enabling Akamai customers use to accelerate value growth and differentiate their businesses. For example, Akamai customers can: • Accurately target content in real time, restricting access to certain content or delivering different versions of content based on the user’s geography and other demographic information. • Reduce spam and the negative effects of badly behaved bots and screen scrapers on their site (see sidebar on next page). • Offload processing intensive applications to greatly improve performance, availability, and scalability by leveraging Akamai’s intelligent edge processing capabilities. Most importantly, the Akamai network is constantly evolving—growing and adapting along with the Web and the ever-changing needs of its participants. Using the EdgePlatform as a technological foundation, customers have the ability to adopt the latest technologies with minimal cost and the flexibility to experiment with minimal risk, allowing them to out-innovate and outpace the competition. Intelligent Solutions for the Social Web: Accelerating Growth, Innovation and Profitability with Akamai 14 AKAMAI INNOVATION: REDUCING SPAM REPORTING & ANALYTICS: KNOWLEDGE AND INSIGHT Just as important as delivering performance is the ability to deliver actionable business insights into a site’s audience and user base. This business intelligence allows social networking companies to understand how performance is boosting their bottom line, and what they can do to further drive business. Akamai provides real-time and historical reporting capabilities that give customers critical insight into their customer base. Akamai’s premium reports include information such as: • Changes in bandwidth usage and number of unique visitors over time • Demographic information on end users, including geography, client bandwidth, and browser versions • Download completion rates by file and geographic region • Top URLs by volume and geography • Average play time, buffer time, and packet loss for streaming video • Number of content upload attempts versus successes • Distributions of Valid User Scores across users or requests. With this level of audience insight, social networking sites can boost ad CPMs with more relevant, targeted ads. They can also pinpoint and fix trouble spots, tailor services to their customer base, and build smart strategies centered on their end users’ needs and interests. Akamai’s unique user intelligence capabilities enable companies to fight bots and malusers more easily and effectively than ever before. Many web-based businesses struggle against the detrimental effects of bots, spammers, and other malicious users. For social networks, the costs are very real. Automated screen scrapers harvest email lists from users’ personal networks. Spammers lure unexpecting community members into scams. These malicious users erode trust and drive away users—ultimately affecting site revenues. At the same time, they consume resources, causing the site to incur additional costs. Unfortunately, existing methods for fighting bots are weak. Cookie- and IP-based identification of malusers is easy to defeat, and pattern-based identification requires resources for continual analysis, as bots can change behavior patterns quickly. Meanwhile, use of CAPTCHAs or other “tests” meant to weed out bots often have the side effect of discouraging real users, negatively impacting the site further. Akamai offers companies a superior approach to mitigating the ill effects of bots, based on its unique position as the delivery channel for over 200 billion web requests per day across 20,000 different domains. Leveraging a decade of experience working with hundreds of networks and the world’s leading web sites, Akamai combines network-level intelligence with anonymous cross-site behavioral data to determine the likelihood that a particular user is a legitimate human. For example, over a period of months, a valid user might visit news sites regularly, shop on a variety of commerce sites, and check email frequently. Bots are far less likely to exhibit this type sophisticated behavior. By looking at a user’s behavioral history, Akamai can compute these “Valid User Scores” and provide them in real time with each user’s request for content. Companies can then use this score to proactively mitigate bot traffic—for example, by presenting a CAPTCHA to users with low scores, while allowing high-scoring users to fast-track their registration or content request. By thus reducing spam, companies are able to offer a high quality user experience that builds trust and loyalty for their site. Intelligent Solutions for the Social Web: Accelerating Growth, Innovation and Profitability with Akamai 15 Why Companies Choose Akamai SUCCESSFUL SOCIAL NETWORKING COMPANIES CHOOSE AKAMAI for its proven experience and expertise in providing solutions that are tailored to the unique needs of this dynamic marketplace. Akamai consistently delivers more than 1 million requests per second for businesses in the social media space, powering 92% of social networking site visits in the U.S. in December 2007, according to data released by Hitwise. Over 40 of the top names in the social networking industry—names like Bebo, Facebook, MySpace, and Tagged—rely on Akamai to deliver their content and accelerate their businesses. So do many other members of the social networking ecosystem, including leading widget developers, ad networks, and social networking platform providers such as RockYou, Slide, VideoEgg, Ning, KickApps, and many more. These companies all know that Akamai offers them the freedom to innovate and succeed without bound. By leveraging Akamai’s on-demand delivery, upload, and storage infrastructure, sites can forego expensive capital outlays, and focus on strategy and growth rather than infrastructure costs and concerns. Akamai doesn’t just deliver bits; it delivers a full solution to help social networking companies monetize the immense latent value of their social graphs. By enabling sites to deliver the best possible user experience—not only through unmatched performance, but also through unique features like spam mitigation and insightful analytics—Akamai gives its customers an important competitive edge borne out by measurable results: increased numbers of users, page views, and most importantly, revenue. In short, for the social networking industry, where the having right technical foundation is critical, successful companies choose Akamai because Akamai drives success. U.S. Headquarters 8 Cambridge Center Cambridge, MA 02142 Tel 617.444.3000 Fax 617.444.3001 U.S. toll-free 877.4AKAMAI (877.425.2624) Akamai Technologies GmbH Park Village, Betastrasse 10 b D-85774 Unterföhring, Germany Tel +49 89 94006.0 www.akamai.com ©2007 Akamai Technologies, Inc. All Rights Reserved. Reproduction in whole or in partin any form or medium without express written permission is prohibited. Akamai, theAkamai wave logo are registered trademarks.Other trademarks contained herein are the property of their respective owners.Akamai believes that the information in thispublication is accurate as of its publication date; such information is subject to change without notice.