The Telegraph Media Group Delivers Better Experiences for Global Readers with Akamai’s Image Manager

UK Publisher Boosts Advertising-Driven KPIs through Improvements of Image Optimizations

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 15, 2017 /PRNewswire/ — Akamai Technologies, Inc. (AKAM), the world’s largest and most trusted cloud delivery platform, today announced that The Telegraph Media Group (TMG), one of the UK’s leading multi-platform publishers, has implemented Akamai’s Image Manager service to improve page load times and increase the duration of users’ sessions, positively impacting the publisher’s ad-related business metrics.

In the face of changing consumer demands and expectations, online publishers are seeking new ways to reach and engage their audiences. Central to the discussion is the fact that high-quality images are effective in driving better online engagement. However, it has become increasingly difficult to deliver a consistent experience to users across the wide variety of devices over unpredictable networks. Oftentimes, website and app performance can easily get bogged down by heavy images and developers have to spend significant time and effort to solve the puzzle of when to deliver the right image for each and every site visitor and app user.  Therefore, the Telegraph Media Group partnered with Akamai to test and understand how optimizing images for key use cases and devices, and thereby improving page load times, could improve user experiences, user session lengths and ad impressions.

A test conducted by SOASTA, an independent company at the time of the study but now part of Akamai, which collected data about page load times and user session lengths, demonstrated the business value of adjusting images to serve the right image in the right format to each device. The Telegraph Media Group saw the following results after using Image Manager:

• Achieved 9.6 percent overall improvement in page load time
• Realized 2 percent overall improvement in overall session length
• Decreased page load time by nearly 34 percent for mobile devices
• Increased sessions lengths by almost 13 percent on mobile devices
• Saw an average 50 percent reduction in image weight
• Boosted engagement and advertisements displayed
• Freed engineering resources to focus on strategic initiatives

“The results proved that our hypothesis was right – that even small incremental performance improvements could ripple out to make a massive downstream impact and for publishers like ours,” said Toby Wright, chief technology officer at Telegraph Media Group. “Image Manager has made a tremendous impact as we test new distribution models. It would take too many engineering resources and hours to try to match Image Manager’s capabilities in displaying the right size image for every screen over every network condition possible. Plus, such efforts would distract us from our strategic focus.”

Akamai’s Web Performance solutions, including Image Manager and Ion, are designed to optimize websites for maximum performance, offload, and deliver an optimal user experience.  Akamai’s Image Manager is an easy-to-use solution that simplifies and automates the process of transforming and quickly delivering the highest quality derivative images to website visitors and mobile app users.  The benefits of Image Manager can include lower costs and higher operational efficiencies for content owners and rich image experiences for end users.  The product is also designed to reduce the weight of images by delivering the right size and resolution for the end device’s screen and connectivity profile at that moment.

“As the test proved, delivering the right image to the right device can perceptibly impact page load times and improve the end-user experience,” said Craig Adams, vice president, web performance products, Akamai Technologies.  “This improvement can significantly affect end-user behavior and encourage longer sessions which, in turn, typically leads to more ads are being served and viewed. For example, publishers such as the Telegraph have been able to drive up their online ad revenues leveraging the Akamai solutions.”

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