Case Study: Nikkei achieves near-real-time engagement analytics and major cost savings with Amazon Web Services

Nikkei - Customer Case Study

Nikkei Inc., a leading multimedia publisher whose revenue relies primarily on subscriptions, needed deeper insight into reader engagement—how articles were read, where users interacted, and session-level behavior—rather than simple page-view counts. Existing third-party analytics imposed delays, data-volume limits and rising fees, and were difficult to adapt to combined reader-and-article attributes, so Nikkei sought a faster, more flexible, and cost-effective solution.

Nikkei built an access-analytics platform called Atlas on AWS (using Amazon SQS, Kinesis, Lambda, EC2, Elasticsearch, Redshift, S3 and other managed services), launching a prototype in under two months without hardware procurement. Atlas processes clickstream data in near real time (Kinesis ingestion ~200 ms, end-to-end analyst queries ~1 s), scales to thousands of requests per second, cut costs to about one-fifth of previous levels while handling 10–20× more data, and delivered an ROI exceeding 5,000%.

Nikkei

Hajime Sano

Data Team, B2C Unit, Digital Business