Akamai Accelerates Gorilla Nation’s Global Publishing Sites

Increasingly dynamic, interactive sites leverage Akamai’s advanced services to improve page load times, user download speeds and overall site effectiveness

CAMBRIDGE, MA . - Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the leader in powering rich media, dynamic transactions and enterprise applications online, today announced that Gorilla Nation Media, a diversified online media company, is leveraging Akamai’s solutions to deliver and accelerate more than 55 global sites.

Exclusively representing hundreds of leading websites in various vertical markets, Gorilla Nation Media develops leading consumer destination sites that enable advertisers to reach targeted audience segments and demographics. All of the Gorilla Nation destinations are rich, dynamic sites with ever-changing content - including videos, images, contests, and discussion boards - and require a globally-distributed platform to deliver rich, dynamically-generated content. For rich, interactive websites, like the many in Gorilla Nation’s portfolio, the ability to accelerate page downloads, increase consumption and improve the overall site experience leads to increased and repeat visitors, incremental ad revenue, page view increases and an improved competitive edge.

“Akamai covers all the bases. Akamai sees our vision and provides Gorilla Nation with innovative solutions to support our expanding business model,” said Alex Godelman, Vice President of Technology, at Gorilla Nation Media. “Akamai is a true partner. When Gorilla Nation realized the need for an alternative CDN service provider, there was no need for an exhaustive review. We went straight to Akamai.”

Since leveraging Akamai, Gorilla Nation is experiencing significantly higher download success rates for rich media, compared to the success rates using other CDN providers. Gorilla Nation has quickly realized the effectiveness of Akamai’s services and the resulting benefits: a much faster experience for the end user, and reduced infrastructure and bandwidth costs that are passed along to its publishers by offloading the traffic to Akamai’s globally-distributed platform.

Gorilla Nation is also leveraging Akamai’s advanced services portfolio. Through the use of Akamai’s Stream OS solution, the company has delivered many successful live events, some garnering more than 60,000 concurrent users. When preparing for prior live events, the Gorilla Nation team would spend hours developing custom solutions for each webcast. With Stream OS’ Live Event Manager module, the efficiencies are many, from easy point and click technology to the ability to toggle between different content sources.

“Akamai’s broad set of solutions are a perfect match for the entire Gorilla Nation portfolio. With Akamai in place, Gorilla Nation delivers faster Web site performance for highly interactive content, scales capacity on demand to support peak traffic, and improves the user experience,” said Tim Napoleon, Chief Strategist for Digital Media at Akamai. “Gorilla Nation’s dedication to building targeted sites with dynamic, personalized content is a critical step toward making online advertising a success moving forward. Akamai looks forward to cultivating our relationship with Gorilla Nation as they continue to pioneer innovation in the online publishing and advertising worlds"

Enterprises have long relied upon content delivery networks (CDNs) to help ensure the scalability, performance, and availability of their static Web sites. Many CDNs, though, have not evolved to meet the delivery challenges posed by today’s sophisticated interactive content. While dynamically-generated content offers an unprecedented opportunity to engage with consumers, it also presents businesses with a new challenge: richer content takes longer to load in a Web page. As site traffic increases, generating pages on-the-fly for thousands of consumers simultaneously can lead to increased delays-and even failures-in delivering content. Akamai’s advanced acceleration solutions are designed to address these challenges.