Case Study: Federated Media Publishing achieves sub-millisecond, web-scale ad serving for 180M monthly users with Aerospike

Federated Media Publishing Powers Third Largest Ad Network with Aerospike

Federated Media Publishing (with subsidiary Lijit Networks) provides advertising services, audience analytics and reader engagement tools to more than 145,000 independent sites, managing ad impressions for roughly 180 million unique monthly visitors. To deliver real-time programmatic buying, page-level brand safety and targeted impressions across distributed ad‑serving pods, the company found relational databases too slow and required a NoSQL key‑value store that could respond within 125 milliseconds and replicate data across data centers.

FMP deployed Aerospike’s real‑time NoSQL database—chosen for sub‑millisecond latency (queries consistently within ~5 ms) and strong replication—and worked with Aerospike to add a star topology for cross‑data‑center replication. Running Aerospike clusters in five data centers (each managing about 50 billion objects and 30–40 GB of data) delivered predictable low latency, automatic failover and continuity, enabled more ads to be served, reduced operational overhead with planned SSD flash optimization, and helped the Federated Media Publisher Network scale into the industry’s third‑largest display ad network.

Federated Media

Aaron Martin

Director of Product Management, Federated Media