Case Study: CrunchBase halves bot-driven pageviews and stabilizes infrastructure without impacting users with Verizon Digital Media Services

CrunchBase cuts pageviews in half by blocking bots with no impact on legitimate users

CrunchBase, the leading platform for discovering companies and the people behind them, faced severe operational strain after launching its 2.0 site: aggressive, IP‑hopping web scrapers and bots triggered random traffic spikes and brownouts, while the team lacked the visibility and tooling to block sophisticated attacks without risking legitimate users, ad deliveries or their long‑term content licensing model.

CrunchBase deployed Verizon Digital Media Services’ inline bot‑mitigation, which learned site behavior and accurately distinguished good bots from bad, immediately blocking 99.9% of malicious traffic. The result: server load became predictable and user‑only, pageviews dropped by half with no impact on users or ads, user‑generated content was protected, and the move even generated nearly 1,000 commercial license prospects.

Crunchbase

Kurt Freytag

Head of Product & Engineering