Press releases

SAN FRANCISCO -- February, 7, 2020 -- Fastly, Inc. (NYSE: FSLY), provider of a global edge cloud platform, today announced real-time traffic trends and phenomena observed across its portfolio of customers during one of the biggest moments for the internet that occurs each year, the Super Bowl. These findings can certainly be a sign of current pop culture trends. Each observation is measured in requests per second (RPS), which represent how many times a user’s requests to a site are delivered during one second.

Audi’s “Let It Go” Ad Proves Power of Gametime Spots
Fastly customer Audi ran the melodic ad featuring Maisie Williams’ cover of “Let It Go,” where she drives her Audi E-Tron Sportback, its upcoming electric SUV. During the spot, Williams chooses to “Let it Go”, saying goodbye to today’s preconceptions of consumption, success and status, and drive towards a more sustainable future. After its ad ran in the second half, Audi’s website saw an impressive 11,422% increase in RPS, compared to the moments before the spike. Its site traffic has also seen a 19.46% elevation on average RPS over the three days post-game, compared to the same time last week. With ad costs reaching up to $5.6 million for a 30-second spot during this year’s game, this is one metric companies hope to see boosted after such an investment.

No Slacking Off on Slack
Slack, another Fastly customer, saw 13.25% more RPS within its platform on the day of the big game than it did on the immediate Sunday prior, January 26, 2020, which could indicate an uplift in people leveraging Slack beyond the physical workplace and typical work week. With so many customers across a range of industries it's not surprising that some were extra busy on game day. The uptime in Slack could have been ad agencies supporting customers with commercials, newsrooms coordinating and publishing stories and other companies doing real-time collaboration for brand activations.

The Annual Halftime Social Media “Drop”
During previous Super Bowls, Fastly has observed a “drop” in RPS to some social media brands, indicating that users put down their phones to watch the evening’s non-football entertainment. The big game in 2020 was no different, with some social media customers experiencing an average drop in RPS by 16% when the halftime performance began, compared to average request activity in the first half of the game.

GIFs and Memes Take Center Stage
Conversely, some of Fastly’s GIF and meme creation customers represented brands that experienced spikes in RPS, indicating a slew of new viral snippets created. In midst of halftime entertainment, these customers saw a 34.97% average increase in RPS compared to their request activity immediately before the spike, and post-game activity observed a 46.66% average increase in RPS.

“What’s really wonderful to see on our platform is proof that we can help customers handle both high-traffic events, such as an ad during a big game or a seasonal flash sale, just as much as we can support typical weekday traffic,” said Dana Wolf, SVP of product and marketing at Fastly. “Our modern network design, which means fewer but more powerful points of presence around the globe, allows us to move customer data and applications closer to a customer’s end user. Ultimately, that manifests in a faster, more reliable digital experience between a person and a brand, and that’s what we see driving the most effective online interactions today.”

With such significant ad investments, it’s essential to ensure your site can handle the attention. For more information about Fastly’s edge cloud platform and its load balancing and intelligent routing benefits afforded to websites or applications, visit: https://www.fastly.com/edge-cloud-platform. Fastly’s blog, “The 3 most-memed-about moments and other internet user behaviors from the Super Bowl,” also dives in deeper on game-time traffic trends and phenomena.