Case Study: DC Thomson achieves a 40% increase in page views and monetizes its digital experience with Elastic

DC Thomson Moves From Solr to Elasticsearch to Personalize and Monetize Their Digital Experience

DC Thomson is a Dundee, Scotland–based media company that publishes newspapers and magazines and runs multiple news sites. Facing technical and scalability problems with Solr while dealing with massive datasets, the digital team needed a more flexible, real‑time search and personalization platform to improve user experience and monetize content.

They migrated to the Elastic Stack—deploying a multi‑node Elasticsearch cluster with Marvel monitoring and integrating content from WordPress, Magento and other sources—to power related‑article recommendations and site search. The change drove a ~40% lift in page views (about 13M pages/month), reduced bounce rates, increased pages per session, sped up UX, and improved ad and paywall monetization, while enabling further editorial tools and personalized content delivery.

DC Thomson

Alistair Colville

Lead Digital Developer