Case Study: Gravity achieves 300% higher click-through rates and real-time personalization with Cloudera

Delivering 300% Better Marketing Campaign Performance with Big Data Expertise

Gravity, founded in 2009, builds interest graphs to deliver fully personalized web content for publishers overwhelmed by massive, rapidly changing feeds. The company outgrew its MySQL sharded setup—hundreds of boxes became hard to manage—so Gravity migrated to a Hadoop/HBase architecture and adopted Cloudera Enterprise to simplify integration, operations and support.

Gravity now streams 10,000+ data points per second into HDFS, using a real-time “eventual consistency” pipeline with an hourly catch-up process, storing serialized profiles in HBase (queried via Hive) and leveraging a Scala-based HPaste library. This infrastructure enables per-user personalization within seconds, drives 300–400% higher CTR, 10x more return visits, longer sessions, and scales to tens of millions of content recommendations, with Cloudera Manager providing critical cluster visibility and management.

Gravity

Jim Benedetto

Chief Technical Officer & Co-founder