Cloudinary Eliminates Complexity of Image Management for Complex Networks

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Complex Networks, a global lifestyle brand and media company, was using a variety of content management systems (CMS) for different sites, each one with its own image management process. This created unnecessary complexity for teams that worked on multiple sites. The process was burdensome for both editors and developers, who had to become well versed in multiple CMS, and know the formats, sizes and restrictions unique to each website. Editors would typically have to create and upload as many as six different versions of an image per site, and oftentimes had to work with the development team to ensure the images were appropriate for the individual site. This resulted in a very time-consuming process and slower time to market. Even with these processes in place, Complex Networks found that many of its pages weren’t optimized because some editors did not follow the standards, uploading images that were too large, which caused page load time to slow and impacted visitors’ experiences.

Complex Networks is a global lifestyle brand and media company, and one of the most influential voices in popular culture today. Complex Networks generates more than 1.1 billion video views a month across its digital channels — Complex, First We Feast, Rated Red, Pigeons and Planes, Sole Collector and more. Complex Network is a Top 10 publisher in the U.S. for social engagement, and develops and distributes original programming for its channels and through output deals with distributors, including Netflix, Facebook, Fuse, Verizon, Snapchat, MSG and more. The company cultivates content that spans popular culture — from music to movies, sports to video games, fashion to food.

Complex Networks started to transition from a monolithic infrastructure to microservices and a serverless architecture, the company sought a more streamlined way to handle images across all of its sites. Using Cloudinary, 99 percent of the images are now automatically transformed and optimized, which frees editors from worrying about the various parameters for each image as it would appear on a specific viewing context. Editors only have to upload one version of an image, and all the necessary changes happen on-the-fly — adjusting to browser, device, viewport, and other parameters — through Cloudinary. At the time of the transition, Complex Networks opted to develop its own proprietary CMS, which is integrated with Cloudinary serving as the image asset management system. All of the image assets in the CMS are automatically uploaded to Cloudinary, where they’re hosted and delivered.

• Eliminating the need to create multiple versions of images, across a variety of CMS, streamlined the editorial workflow.
• Performance optimization ensured that page load time improved.
• The flexibility and features of Cloudinary also resulted in additional benefits for Complex Networks.

• 15%–25% faster page load time
• Up to 20% increase in user engagement
• 50%–90% time savings for media management