Case Study: Mediavine cuts image hosting costs 50% and speeds image uploads with Cloudinary

How Mediavine Handled Image Load in a 50m+ Page-Views Rails Site

Mediavine runs a network of high-traffic entertainment and lifestyle sites (including The Hollywood Gossip, TV Fanatic, Movie Fanatic and Food Fanatic) that together serve about 50 million page views per month and are extremely image‑heavy. Their custom Ruby on Rails CMS on Heroku relied on Carrierwave and mini_magick, but as uploads and image processing scaled they hit performance limits, timeouts and dyno bottlenecks — and in‑house direct‑to‑S3 solutions proved complex.

They moved to Cloudinary, which provided fast, easy browser uploads, eliminated timeout issues, and added features like reliable animated‑GIF scaling, face detection and IPTC metadata extraction with minimal integration work via Cloudinary’s gem and Carrierwave support. The switch cut direct image hosting costs roughly in half, greatly reduced Heroku worker dynos, and allowed migration of hundreds of thousands of images in under an hour with minimal code changes.

Mediavine

Eric Hochberger

Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer, and Head of Development