Company: kicker
Industry: Media
German football (soccer) publication kicker has been providing premiere football content for more than a hundred years.
kicker’s website and mobile counterpart have grown increasingly popular and continue to attract new readership, and the team realized its tech stack was reaching its performance limitations.
After initially implementing an open source Redis solution, the team upgraded to Redis Enterprise for a caching solution, which has dramatically improved the performance of both its website and mobile counterpart, increasing reader satisfaction and supporting kicker’s advertising reach.
With Redis Enterprise, kicker has been able to reduce its spend on web servers by 40% and cut its costs for database servers by 60%, significantly reducing operational expenses, complexity, and overall TCO.
Founded in 1920, kicker has delivered football (soccer) content to a German audience for more than a hundred years. When the football publication launched its digital edition in 1997, it brought its sports stories to fans all around the world. Readers come to kicker for its profiles of football legends and rising stars, a unique game live-ticker, analyses and commentary, and a vast collection of media content, including galleries and videos.
The kicker.de website generates more than two billion page impressions per month, with a yearly growth rate of more than 15%. The mobile version of the website, along with kicker’s app, have also enjoyed phenomenal growth in recent years—the app is consistently ranked among the top ten apps in its category. But as kicker’s audience continues to grow, the performance limitations of the company’s existing tech stack became apparent and the tech team knew it needed an intelligent caching solution to keep up.
kicker’s developers first turned to open source Redis to implement a caching solution for its website. But with a rapidly growing international user base, relying on the open source version of Redis was slowly becoming an operational headache. By its nature, scaling Redis requires manual intervention for configuration, integration in monitoring environments, and other operational aspects, quickly increasing complexity, deployment overhead, and corresponding overall total cost of ownership (TCO).
The team decided to upgrade to Redis Enterprise. Its intelligent caching solution has increased the website and mobile app performance substantially compared to the previous versions of these two components without the caching in place. This has a direct impact on the overall user experience: users obtain the desired information faster and thereby get a higher customer satisfaction. By providing fast content delivery and sustainably increasing the availability of the portal, kicker is able to cover the growing advertising reach. This noticeably adds to the overall conversion rate of both solutions.
“With Redis Enterprise, we’ve been able to improve responsiveness on our website as well as our strategic mobile app, resulting in a higher customer satisfaction and additional revenue,” says Dani Mohr, Head of Software Development at kicker. “Enterprise-grade support as well as seamless integration has allowed us to keep TCO in check.”
By using Redis Enterprise, kicker’s team has been able to retire previously deployed hardware and software. Plus, Redis Enterprise has proven it can meet both current and future scalability requirements—kicker has reduced its spend on web servers by 40% and trimmed its costs for database servers by 60%, significantly reducing operational costs, complexity, and overall TCO.
The kicker team is planning to use Redis Enterprise for an expansion of the brand, as well as considering it for a future project that will provide indexing capabilities for both current and archived content. The kicker archive contains 100 years of national and international soccer events, results, team memberships and other facts—this will be the next challenge where Redis Enterprise can power user experience and revenue growth.
