Fastly for Digital Publishing Datasheet

In the “always-on” cycle of news and entertainment, it’s not 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 one or more of these are encountered.

Publishers now face a deeper challenge, too: AI systems that can ingest an article, summarize it, and answer a reader’s question directly – no click, no visit, no relationship formed. The content does the work, and too often the publisher sees no return. Winning audience share today means delivering fast, protected, and personalized experiences to human readers, while deciding on your own terms how AI can access what you publish.

Faster Experiences and More Control

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 edge cloud network is designed to meet the needs of digital publishers with an architecture that serves content faster than traditional CDNs. Benefit from the ability to cache and update content at the edge - milliseconds away from your readers. Deliver tailored experiences in near real time, regardless of device, location, or network.

The edge is also where you take back control from AI. Search disruption and social fragmentation were battles over attention; AI is a battle over the ownership of value. Fastly gives you the ability to decide, at the edge and before traffic ever reaches your origin, which bots and AI crawlers to allow, block, deceive, charge, or measure.

In short, we offer an unprecedented level of performance, control, security, and content protection in a single solution.

Empower Your 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. The Fastly platform gives you the ability to invalidate content worldwide within 150 milliseconds of receiving a purge request with Instant Purge. This functionality can be easily integrated into existing CMS workflows via plugins and API calls.

“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, The Guardian

Protect Your Content. Control How It’s Used

Get the protection and control you need without sacrificing performance. Secure your web apps and APIs at scale with Fastly’s Next-Gen 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 reader - this equals both time savings and better experiences.

Take that same control over AI. Fastly’s AI Bot Management tells verified AI crawlers from traffic merely claiming to be AI - because not all AI traffic is bad traffic. From there, you decide: allow trusted, credentialed bots; block abusive ones that scrape your content at scale without consent or compensation; or use Fastly Deception to serve suspicious bots low-value, misleading responses that waste their resources instead of yours.

When a commercial AI system wants to ingest your content to train a model or power a product, our technical partnerships let you meter that access and get paid for it, rather than absorbing the infrastructure cost for free. Get visibility into when and how your content is being cited or used across the AI ecosystem, so every access, blocking, or monetization decision is based on real data.

Deliver a Consistently Fast, Rich Media Experience

Nothing should ever stand in the way of great user experiences. Digital publishers need a platform that continuously ensures visitors get a high-performance experience, regardless of traffic spikes from breaking news, viral content, surges of AI crawler traffic, 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.

“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, Business Insider

Build Loyalty Through Personalized Experiences

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.

As AI-generated answers change how, and whether, readers click through to a source at all, the experience you deliver to the readers who do land on your site matters even more. Personalization keeps them engaged, coming back, and converting to subscribers instead of bouncing to the next AI summary.

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.

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.

That same agility applies to AI. As new crawlers, models, and licensing terms emerge, you can update which bots you allow, block, or charge in seconds - without waiting on a deployment cycle.