Friendster testimonial

Founded in 2002, Friendster—which ranks as one of the top 40 sites on the Internet*—is the leading online community for making new friends, communicating with existing friends, sharing information, organizing activities, finding dates, and re-connecting with lost friends. With more than 31+ million members and growing, Friendster is benefiting from the meteoric rise of social networking on the Web. Committed to fully exploiting the potential of this new way of connecting, Friendster is constantly developing and adding technologies to help its 16 million unique global users find new ways to interact and express themselves.

Due to the large and varied nature of its membership, Friendster must store and deliver a considerable number of small files, which are not requested very frequently. Fortunately, Akamai’s network provides the intelligence and processing flexibility to handle content with such traffic patterns. After implementing Akamai global content delivery and managed storage services, the images on Friendster’s site load faster, which in turn means that the entire page renders more quickly. According to Sarna, “We had a seamless integration onto the Akamai platform—literally plug and play within minutes—and immediately saw a 33% percent improvement in the overall page loading times.” As an advertising-supported site, increased performance enables Friendster to serve more page views and generate more revenue. In fact, Friendster tripled page views in about one month, to more than 27.5 million page views.

"Akamai’s services were a primary factor in our ability to steadily increase overall daily page views in March. Our sales team seized on the opportunity to monetize this additional traffic, and the result was increased revenue in a short period of time."
—Aaron Barnes, VP Sales, Friendster