Daily Caller

Daily Caller serves content quicker and more securely, while opening new channels of ad revenue with VigLink and Cloudflare.

The Daily Caller is one of America’s largest and fastest-growing news publications. Their team of reporters and editors works around the clock to deliver original reporting, in-depth investigations, entertainment, thought-provoking commentary and up-to-the-second breaking news. The Daily Caller services 20 million unique visitors, accounting for nearly 100 million pageviews every month.

Daily Caller’s Challenge: Performance, Security, and Monetization

To be one of the largest and fastest-growing news publications in the country, Daily Caller constantly looks to improve its publication platform. With the rise of mobile traffic and the growing consumer demand for fast-as-possible content, AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) offers publishers the ability to serve mobile content at over three times faster than normal pages. When Daily Caller implemented AMP for their platform, the performance results and page view numbers were awesome, but there was one challenge: they couldn’t monetize links on these AMP enabled pages.

Rapid scale also came with some natural growing pains for Daily Caller. Previous methods of content delivery were topping out on performance and beginning to get expensive, while increased popularity and notoriety also meant Daily Caller was becoming a bigger and bigger target for DDoS attacks. Expensive bandwidth and downtime from attack can both be detrimental to a news publication offering its breaking news.

Daily Caller’s Solution: AMP Pages Served Through Cloudflare & Monetized by VigLink

Publishers are constantly battling for revenue with search giants and content aggregators offering publisher content to readers before users ever get to the publisher’s monetizable platform. Monetization is particularly difficult for publishers who want to leverage Google’s AMP cache, which quickly serves AMP pages to the search engine’s users, but serves them on a Google owned domain.

Daily Caller found one revenue stream through a link-monetization partner, Viglink, that offers the ability for Daily Caller to monetize links on their pages by tracking clicks on Daily Caller pages through a proprietary Javascript snippet. However, AMP pages don’t allow 3rd party javascript to be inserted, and with Google’s AMP cache heavily regulated by the search provider, workarounds are almost impossible.

VigLink identified Cloudflare’s Ampersand as a way for publishers to earn from AMP pages and connected Daily Caller, one of their publishers, to this monetization solution. By providing a proprietary AMP cache, Ampersand allows publishers to have greater control over their AMP pages, meaning publishers like Daily Caller can manage the domain their AMP pages are served on, as well as how the pages are presented. In this case, Cloudflare helps Daily Caller use Viglink’s link monetization by applying the relevant scripts through Viglink’s API in the backend. Thus, Daily Caller not only gets faster mobile pages, but also gets to keep and maintain control and monetization of these pages. In the four weeks after deploying Ampersand, Daily Caller saw a 3X rise in mobile affiliated click traffic and a 10X rise in mobile revenue.

Though Ampersand brought Cloudflare to Daily Caller’s attention, Cloudflare’s network of products including Content Delivery and DDoS mitigation were perfect solutions for Daily Caller’s growing pains. Now Daily Caller’s pages are served from Cloudflare’s CDN (Content Delivery Network) at over 115 Cloudflare Data Centers around the world. End readers get served content from data centers closest to them, not only improving page load time by reducing geographic latency and requests to the origin, but also saving Daily Caller bandwidth.

Likewise, Daily Caller’s web properties are now protected by Cloudflare’s state-of-the-art DDoS mitigation. Cloudflare’s DDoS mitigation absorbs any attacks aimed at Daily Caller, and allows normal traffic to flow as usual. This protection ensures Daily Caller is always online offering readers the latest breaking news.