Case Study: FOX Sports Interactive achieves 10x traffic scalability and increased ad revenue with Akamai Technologies

Fox Sports Scores With More Traffic, More Revenues

FOX Sports, the U.S. sports media arm of News Corporation, faced a rapid relaunch challenge when it agreed to provide exclusive sports content for MSN in 2004. With only four months to prepare and an expected multi‑fold traffic spike, the company needed to scale infrastructure to support an audience of less‑intense, casual fans, convert them into engaged visitors, deliver richer content without degrading performance, and meet strict SLAs to protect ad revenues.

FOX Sports deployed Akamai’s CDN and web performance solutions to absorb traffic and security threats, accelerate page loads, and add edge capabilities for personalization—allowing the site to handle a sustained 10x traffic increase while raising hardware costs only about 25%. The result was a consistently faster, more reliable site (homepage downloads twice as fast as competitors), increased ad and sponsorship sales, new data‑feed revenue opportunities, and preserved brand reputation.

Fox Sports Interactive

Mark Richards

VP of Infrastructure & Technical Operations