Fastly for Digital Publishing

Empower your editors with a modern content delivery network

Digital PublishingContent deliveryOnline mediaEdge cloud platformPersonalization

Digital publishers must deliver content to readers and aggregators the moment it is ready. Read on to evaluate the practical challenges a legacy CDN will impose and how Fastly can help.

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Overview

In the “always-on” cycle of news and entertainment, it’s no longer enough to deliver in-depth content and eye-catching headlines — readers expect information to be personalized and available at all times, regardless of platform or location. They expect to be entertained, and they have fully embraced the merging of traditional publishing and streaming media but react poorly to delays, downtime, and buffering and are quick to move on when these are encountered.

Why Fastly?

By using a modern content delivery network (CDN), you can serve digital content faster, as well as customize and optimize visitor experiences to win audience share. The Fastly CDN, built on our modern edge cloud network, is designed to meet the needs of digital publishers with an architecture that serves content faster than traditional CDNs. We give you the ability to cache and update content at the edge — milliseconds away from your readers. Plus, you can deliver tailored experiences in near real time, regardless of device, location, or network. In short, we offer an unprecedented level of performance, control, and security in a single solution.

Empower editors to publish in real time

Editors want to have confidence that content is current and immediately available worldwide. They need the ability to add, remove, or update content instantly from within existing content management system (CMS) workflows. Our CDN gives you the ability to invalidate content worldwide within a mean time of 150 milliseconds of receiving a purge request. This functionality can be easily integrated into existing CMS workflows via plugins and API calls.

theguardian

"If breaking news happens and it isn’t on our site within seconds, visitors will go elsewhere. With Fastly, updates are reflected on our site pages within milliseconds and we’ve seen a 20% improvement in time to first byte around the world."

Matthew O’Brien

Software Architect

Secure and authenticate at the edge

Get the protection and control you need without sacrificing performance. Secure your web apps and APIs at scale with the Fastly Next-Gen Web Application Firewall (WAF) no matter where you deploy them. With DDoS mitigation, bot protection, and TLS encryption, we offer an integrated solution to ensure valuable content is protected.

Control content access at the edge of our network with paywall authentication. Cache authentication responses to increase the speed of future requests from the same user — this equals both time savings and better experiences.

Deliver a consistently fast, rich media experience

Nothing should ever stand in the the way of great user experiences. Digital publishers need a CDN that continuously ensures visitors get a high-performance experience, regardless of traffic spikes from breaking news, viral content, or even infrastructure failure. Our network is designed to absorb distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) traffic without disrupting the experience of legitimate visitors.

If servers go offline or take longer than usual to update, our serve stale feature provides the option of serving previously published content rather than an error message. And with Image Optimizer, you can serve bandwidth-efficient images on the fly: store just one version of each image and then transform, serve, and cache an optimized version on demand, eliminating unnecessary burdens on infrastructure.

Learn more about Image Optimizer →

Business Insider

"We were able to simply drop Fastly on top of our current implementation, which was a huge advantage. It was clear that other CDNs would have required us to change a lot of our infrastructure, but Fastly acts as an extension of our stack."

Julie Sommerville

VP of Engineering

Instantly scale concurrent video streams

Exceed expectations for responsive online video by caching content closer to your readers, eliminating the need to fetch from origin. Our On-the-Fly-Packager delivers a faster overall viewing experience by instantly transmuxing and resizing content, and since only the requested portion is packaged, playback is immediate.

Personalize content to increase engagement

Great user experiences create and nurture enduring relationships. Increase engagement with your visitors via tailored and personalized content. Our network lets you customize content based on geo-location, browser-specified language preference, device type, and any other aspect of the request using logic at the edge. This functionality is included in our standard service and can be used to run A/B tests to optimize experiences and engagement around the world.

Unlike other multivariate testing platforms, we don’t use third-party HTML tags, which require sending requests back to the origin server. As a result, sites run faster, and fewer requests to origin help save on operating costs.

Improve business agility

Our network allows your teams to gain and maintain granular control over how content is served, while also making changes as needed. We empower our customers to edit and deploy their own configurations so they can make iterative enhancements instantly. Configuration changes can be activated around the globe in seconds by using our user interface or API calls. Once the change is live, our real-time logs help you glean insights into exactly how visitors are engaging with content and continue to refine settings for an optimal user experience.

Solutions Brief
Fastly in content publishing

How Fastly’s Edge Cloud platform is helping reinvent digital publishing

Datasheet
Fastly Next-Gen WAF

Protect your apps and APIs everywhere from a single solution

Datasheet
Fastly in Streaming Media

See how optimized delivery can improve user engagement

Datasheet
Real-Time Logging

Actionable insight and visibility, customized to fit your business needs

Meet a more powerful global network.

Our network is all about greater efficiency. With our strategically placed points of presence (POPs), you can scale on-demand and deliver seamlessly during major events and traffic spikes. Get the peace of mind that comes with truly reliable performance — wherever users may be browsing, watching, shopping, or doing business.

313 Tbps

Edge network capacity1

150 ms

Mean purge time2

>1.8 trillion

Daily requests served4

~90% of customers

Run Next-Gen WAF in blocking mode3

As of September 30, 2023

As of December 31, 2019

As of March 31, 2021

As of July 31, 2023

Ready to get started?

Get in touch.