Case Study: Youneeq achieves real-time personalized content recommendations at sub-second delivery with DataStax

Youneeq Drives Innovations in Media Industry with Real-time Personalized Content Recommendations

Youneeq is a real-time personalization company for digital publishers that delivers individualized web content and ad targeting updated with every click. Faced with scaling limits from their earlier relational and MongoDB back ends, they needed a fast, extensible data platform that could handle mixed read/write loads, provide tunable consistency for low-latency personalization, support deep analytics, and simplify operations and security for a growing startup.

They migrated to Apache Cassandra via DataStax Enterprise, leveraging OpsCenter for management and evaluating integrated Solr and Spark for analytics. The result is a highly responsive platform—typical production loads of 400–1,100 r/w ops/sec at under 0.2 ms latency, with peaks near 10,000 ops/sec at ~0.3 ms—enabling personalized content to be served in under a third of a second, reducing caching needs, improving ad/content targeting, and driving greater user engagement and revenue while simplifying security and operations.

Youneeq

Mike Lally

Chief Architect