Case Study: Wenner Media achieves 75% operations cost savings and real-time site resilience with Fastly

Wenner Media - Customer Case Study

Wenner Media, publisher of Rolling Stone, Us Weekly, Men’s Journal and Glixel, was shifting from print to digital and bringing its tech in-house. Their legacy CDN and origin systems frequently failed under spikes of traffic during awards and breaking-news events, preventing timely publishing and threatening ad revenue.

By adopting Fastly—using Instant Purge, surrogate keys, stale-if-error, real-time analytics, custom VCL and edge dictionaries—Wenner could set long TTLs, purge content instantly, serve cached content during outages, make config changes in seconds, and offload image delivery at the edge. The outcome: reliable real-time updates during major events, a faster responsive Rolling Stone relaunch, freed engineering time for product work, and dramatic cost reductions (roughly 75–80% lower origin/infrastructure costs) with much-improved uptime.

Wenner Media

Chris Boylan

Director of Engineering