Case Study: Telegraph Media Group achieves faster page loads and increased ad-driven revenue with Akamai Technologies' Image Manager

How the Telegraph Significantly Boosted Advertising-Driven KPIs through Image Optimization

Telegraph Media Group, a long-established digital news publisher, needed to deliver faster, more engaging experiences to drive subscriptions and ad revenue while keeping engineering focused on strategic work. Heavy image payloads were slowing page loads and reducing session lengths, so TMG and Akamai set out to test whether optimizing images would improve engagement and ad-driven KPIs.

Akamai’s Image Manager reduced image weight by 10–60%, cutting overall page load times by 9.6% and boosting session length by 2% (an average +0.041 pages per session), with mobile seeing the biggest gains—page loads down ~34% and sessions up 12.8% (+0.193 pages). The changes increased ad impressions and freed engineering resources; Akamai estimated a publisher with 100M monthly uniques could see roughly £65,000/month in incremental ad revenue (about £77,000/month for mobile-heavy audiences).

Telegraph Media Group

Toby Wright

Chief Technology Officer