Scaling to 500 million monthly active users
How Realtime is helping WebSpectator.com change digital advertisement
WebSpectator.com, the world’s first time and engagement advertising solution for mobile & web, uses the Realtime Messaging Platform to connect to their 500 million unique users around the globe.
For WebSpectator.com “time is money” is more than just words, it’s a proven fact. Each second they are increasing their INC.500 publisher’s Ad revenue by monetizing the time users spend using their websites and mobile apps.
The Realtime Messaging Platform is proud to be powering the patented revolutionary WebSpectator technology from their first page-view to their staggering 3.3 billion page-views last month.
https://www.quantcast.com/p-HGAVM7nQJ_sep?country=GLOBAL
Why real-time?
In simple terms, WebSpectator allows advertisers to know the exact amount of time users spent seeing their ads and never charges for unseen ads. To achieve this unprecedented level of control, WebSpectator needs to know which ads are visible in the user’s screens. For each ad. For each user.
On top of all these strict business requirements, in order to keep up with the advertising industry accreditation standards, all “effective exposure time monetization” logic must be computed in WebSpectator’s backend servers, never at the client. This means they need to ingest all the data triggered by the users events in real-time. And it’s a lot of data per second.
Big websites. Big data. Small infrastructure.
By leveraging the Realtime Messaging Platform, WebSpectator keeps infrastructure costs down and focus on their core-business.
Instead of worrying on managing the required infrastructure to scale to hundreds of thousands of concurrent users while keeping proper support for all browsers and mobile platforms, WebSpectator can simply focus on improving the features their advertisers and publishers love so much.
And when you aggregate high-profile publishers like Forbes, TMZ, Condé Nast, ABC News and Wired — just to mention a few — all with high-traffic digital properties, web and mobile, the number of concurrent users is always high and the number of events they generate is higher, normally tens of thousands per second.
The role of the Realtime Messaging Platform in WebSpectator’s stack is to establish a full-duplex connection to each user of those digital properties — WebSockets whenever possible — to receive the user events and deliver them to the WebSpectator backend servers for processing. Whenever the WebSpectator backend needs to retrieve some user specific data it simply publishes a command in the appropriate pub/sub channel and the Realtime Messaging Platform routes and delivers it to the targeted user in a few milliseconds. The same happens with the client command reply.
The Realtime Platform is also responsible for the infrastructure scaling, so WebSpectator doesn’t need to worry if all of a sudden some digital publisher has just published some viral content and their traffic is 10x or 100x the normal traffic. They rest assured every user will be connected with the least latency possible and no single advertisement dollar will be lost.
Also by using the Realtime Messaging Platform as a communication abstraction layer, the WebSpectator components only have to deal with their own protocol and can be oblivious of the methods and protocols used to ingest and broadcast data in non-homogeneous and sometimes unstable internet networks.
By not having to deal with these methods and protocols the WebSpectator backend components become faster and less resource-hungry, reducing the infrastructure costs. The overall architecture becomes simpler and easier to maintain.
Do what you do best and outsource the rest
The advice from the legendary business consultant Peter Drucker still holds today and in this “there’s-a-service-for-that” world we are living in, it’s truer than ever before. And simpler to do.
Innovative companies like WebSpectator need to move fast and invest hard on their unique value proposition. There’s no time to be lost re-inventing the wheel, specially developing services that are already commodities — you don’t build you own electric grid so why should you build your own messaging platform?
To achieve their goals, these lean-and-mean companies need to find the right partners with the same highly-focused DNA. Today it makes no sense coding all levels of the stack when there are already great specialized services available. These services probably do a better job than your engineering team would do, not because they’re better engineers but because it’s their core-business and they are focused in it — just like you are focused in yours.
With the right partners the value chain can be so much more than the sum of its parts and can introduce serious industry disruption. That’s exactly what WebSpectator is doing in the digital advertisement industry and Realtime is proud to be a part of that.
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