As content consumption moves online and becomes more interactive, media companies face the challenge of distributing their works in new forms and on new screens. In this talk we will address some of the challenges faced in serving media content to large audiences, such as traffic spikes, speed of delivery, and reliability. We will review some architectural, monitoring, and process-related solutions to these challenges. We will also discuss the increasing trend of integrating content, advertising, and analytics from third party providers. In an environment where SLA's are not always properly defined, and more often not properly monitored, managing third-party content is a challenge for anyone trying to provide a branded, seamless customer experience online. Join John Atkinson to learn his strategies for optimizing Total Beauty Media’s sites, and handling the performance of their 3rd party content and service providers. About the Speaker: John Atkinson is the Director of Product Development at Total Beauty Media, Inc. He has more than 10 years of experience building interactive software applications, with an emphasis on consumer facing web development. John started his career in the home automation industry, architecting interfaces and designing networks for award-winning "smart homes." His Peace Corps service building community wireless networks in Ghana was featured in the 2010 BBC documentary "Digital Revolution." Most recently, John was the lead developer for the AT&T Blue Room, one of the first sites to offer live streaming of music and sporting events online. John received a BS in mechanical engineering from the University of Southern California.

1. Optimizing Web Performance for
Media Sites
4/18/2012

2. What is a media site?
Focus on content delivery
• Publish to a large audience
• Many users are just browsing
• Lots of rich media → images, videos, documents, interactive objects
• Examples: Huffington Post, Break, Total Beauty
2

3. TBMG media properties
3

4. Quick overview
Let's look at ..
• Common problems
• First party solutions
• 3rd party solutions
4

5. Problems
Some of the everyday issues for media sites
• Lots of pages and objects to serve, minimal resources
• Often there is a good amount of media per page
• Slow, unreliable serving capabilities of advertisers and ad networks
• Traffic spikes from content aggregation sites
5

6. Solutions
Highest impact 1st-party content solutions for our
sites
• Geographically distributed content
• Spriting (dev process)
• Minimize compute → Flat caching and personalized js (dev process),
Homepage + Quiz example
• Minimize compute → Intermediary tables, 'de-normalized' (dev
process), great on read heavy apps
6

7. Personalized JS
Top right corner of a page
on TotalBeauty.com -
Same father html + inline js
7

8. Solutions
Highest impact 3rd party content solutions for our
sites
• Prioritize and backload js
• Lazy load longer pages
• Minimize social plug-in footprint (below fold added to page on scroll)
• Hound providers → Send waterfall reports to show low performing
providers the issues
8

9. Prioritize + Backload js
9

10. Fails
What we've tried that didn't work so well
• Some pages / browsers have trouble with lazy load
• Some js hates backloading
• Sometimes the extra dev work involved in spriting outweighs the
benefit
• Dynamic content CDN's
10

11. Contact info
Feel free to reach out ..
• John Atkinson
• jatkinson@totalbeauty.com
• @totaljohn
• www.totalbeautymedia.com
11