THINGS AD NETWORKS

SHOULD EVALUATE WHEN

CHOOSING A CDN10

Advertisers have just a split second to grab their target audience’s attention with banners,

videos, animated graphics and other creative assets. They simply cannot afford to have

those precious seconds lost to slow load times, network lag or video buffering. Of course

response time matters, and not just with ad delivery, but with the delivery of all content

and rich media – videos, live streaming, games, interactive apps and websites, you name

it. Not only does faster delivery impact revenue by increasing conversion rates, but it

also preserves your critical publisher relationships by minimizing page load pain points.

1

Highwinds®Instant Gratification™Means Speed.

Performance. Because Response Time Matters.

We’ve made it our mission to own and operate the fastest CDN on the planet. And we’ve succeeded. But don’t just take our word for it. Third-party testing tools consistently prove it. As part of every free trial with Highwinds, we encourage, and even help facilitate, testing our CDN side-by-side with your current CDN provider or others you are considering. We even offer SelectPath™, an intuitive load balancing solution that allows you to easily implement multiple CDNs. We’ll fight for and earn every bit you push over our network.

People make the difference. When reviewing CDNs, find out if their support operations

are pushed through technology-based support systems, or if you can always get a

human being on the phone when you want one. Some CDNs outsource their support

operations. Don’t settle for that scenario! And naturally, since the world of advertising is

24x7x365, make sure your CDN provider offers round-the-clock support.

2

Highwinds® Instant Gratification™Provides Live Phone Support.

Live Support. Real People. Any Time. Every Time.

Our customers tell us that the number one reason they chose Highwinds and continue to work with us is our support team. Highwinds Support is staffed exclusively with highly-trained, full-time, Highwinds employees. Additionally, they understand the unique technical challenges of ad delivery because we’ve worked with top ad networks for years. And perhaps most importantly, because we know the ad world never sleeps, our live phone support is available 24x7x365.

Due to the inherent competitive nature of online advertising, ad networks are driving

a high percentage of innovation in the space. When evaluating CDNs, find out which

companies have a team of developers that can build new features to support your

growing and ever-changing platform. Most don’t. Either they are unwilling or unable

to respond to the rapid rate of change. That can slow you down while your competition

flies right on by.

3

Highwinds®Instant Gratification™Means Building NewFeatures Fast.

Innovation. Look for Creative Techies, Like You.

Highwinds started as a development shop, and this remains a key component of our DNA today. Take StrikeTracker®, for example, which was the first and only CDN portal that delivered true real-time analytics. We’re creative techies, and we’re proud of it. Let’s hop on a call, or better yet, we’ll hop on a plane to get together with your engineers. We’re always eager to collaborate with you on the next big thing that will propel your business. We also have exciting new things to share in mobile delivery, social integration and viewer analytics.

Sometimes, marketers try to influence the buying behavior of a global audience; other

times, a localized one. Regardless of whether an ad needs to reach people in New York

City or Stockholm, or the whole country or continent or hemisphere, or any or all of

A-Pac, or any or all of Western Europe, or Eastern, or Northern or Southern, or in the

most dense South American cities, or just some remote area of Brazil … if an ad’s target

is the 837 people who call Fate, Texas, home, or all seven billion of us on Earth, look for a

CDN with true global reach. Do they own their own infrastructure? Where are their PoPs

located? Do they rely exclusively on their own waves or do they load balance across

all of the top-performing networks? Do they peer with the best ISPs and in the most

important exchanges? Can they give you the reach you need?

4

Highwinds® Instant Gratification™is for Everyone, Everywhere.

Global Reach. Get It There, Anywhere “There” Is.

Highwinds CDN will get it “there.” Advertisers need reliable ad delivery to people across the street and around the world. Our CDN was built for both. In addition to its 70+ PoPs on five continents, the Highwinds RollingThunder® network (our privately owned, ringed and redundant global infrastructure) peers with more than 800 major ISPs and more than 14,000 ASNs, which extends the network to the far reaches of the globe and puts end users just one hop away.

There’s nothing worse than engaging on the phone with a sales guy or support technician

who doesn’t speak your technical language, doesn’t understand your specific needs

or hasn’t solved the problems you’re up against. The modern advertising landscape is

complex, made up of many layers, real-time bidding, creatives varying from banners to

native and static to dynamic. To win, you have to be both smart and fast, to see real-time

analytics and understand how to interpret and react to actionable data. Uninformed

delivery leads to missed opportunity. That’s unacceptable.

5

Highwinds® InstantGratification™ is for the AdvertisingCommunity.

Industry Expertise. Live It, Breathe It, Get It.

Our sales and engineering teams have experience selling to, working for and supporting ad networks. Many of us have highly creative and/or highly technical backgrounds. So, we get it. We get what our advertising customers are trying to accomplish. We know the challenges they face in today’s media-saturated world. We understand their very unique requirements. We also closely follow advertising trends and have a presence at industry events. We talk to customers all the time about how we can better support them. It’s because we’re so tuned in that we’re able to perfectly align each ad customer’s needs with just the right CDN solution.

Advertising is all about making connections, connecting people to brands. CDN is all

about making connections, too, connecting people to content. It’s also about building

relationships. If you buy CDN by filling out an online form, or if you only hear from your

account representative when your renewal is coming up, then you don’t have a partner

… you have a vendor. Will your CDN help you find new customers; get out in front of

new trends; expand your product portfolio by integrating new tech; and build business

relationships that grow revenues?

6

Highwinds® Instant Gratification™Helps You Grow Your Business.

Relationships. It’s All About Making Connections.

We offer a unique “connection” advantage to our customers because of the composition of our customer roster. Not only do we have a healthy roster of advertising customers, but we are most likely already delivering content for some of your largest gaming, media and entertainment publishers, too. We also have a transparent management team, execs who talk to customers, speak at industry events, walk exhibit hall floors, and most of our team members have extensive backgrounds in the industries we serve. In other words, we’re very well-connected. We make introductions when it’s in our customers’ best interest to do so.

The ad world is built on creativity and statistics. While creative holds the key to capturing

attention and influencing buying behavior, data holds the key to accurately targeting

campaigns and measuring effectiveness. Look for a CDN that provides real-time analytics.

Well, start by ruling out any CDN that doesn’t offer any analytics (there are many). Then,

look closely at the ones that claim real-time analytics. The only acceptable speed for CDN

analytics is real-time, but beware – some CDNs falsely advertise “real-time.” If a CDN’s

definition of real-time is, in actuality, 15 minutes, or even two minutes, that’s not real-

time enough. In fact, it’s not real-time at all. Instant, immediate, milliseconds … that’s

real-time. And of course, check the quality of the analytics provided. Even real-time data

is useless if it’s not accurate and actionable.

7

Highwinds® Instant Gratification™Delivers True Real-Time Analytics.

Analytics.You Need ‘Em. Who’s Got ‘Em?

Many of our advertising customers – from the creatives to the pure-play ad networks, and everybody in between – already have their own analytics systems in place, and that’s great! We don’t need to replace anyone’s analytics, but we can augment them as a value-add for our customers. StrikeTracker, our content management and analytics portal, provides true real-time analytics on ads being delivered across our network. (And yes, by “real-time” we really do mean “instant.” Let us prove it to you.) With our analytics, you’ll get stats like number of hits, hits per second, completion ratios, total throughput, top files and more. Also, our “top regions” data, real-time heat map and heat grid, and geo-blocking (by country, state, zip code, etc.) tools, can help advertisers geo-target campaigns. Highwinds’ analytics are unmatched in the industry. No other CDN offers analytics like we do, and some don’t offer analytics at all.

Can you envision calling your CDN every time you need to purge a file or provision a new

sub-account? Unfortunately, that’s the case with many CDNs. A few have a gatekeeper

strategy because they like to maintain some control over the content distributed across

their network. More often than not, however, they simply didn’t develop self-service

technology that enables customers to purge files and provision sub-accounts on their

own. You know what further compounds this already impractical gatekeeper situation?

If 24x7x365 support isn’t available. Imagine the repercussions of not being able to

purge an underperforming ad while your CDN’s support team sleeps. It’s your content.

Shouldn’t you control it? Look for self-service tools.

8

Highwinds® Instant Gratification™Gives You Control of Your Content.

Real-Time Ops. Because Nobody Has Time To Wait.

We always encourage our customers to use our phone or online support systems any time they need assistance. That’s why we have live support, 24x7x365. But we also give you complete control over your content delivery operations. We never make you place a call or open a support ticket to purge a file or provision a new sub-account. We certainly can do it for you, but with StrikeTracker, you’ll have the means to do it yourself. You can use self-service tools to upload new files for instant propagation across our global network. And perhaps more importantly, you’ll be able to purge underperforming ads from the network within seconds. We also give our customers self-service account provisioning capabilities (to create and manage accounts seven levels deep), as well as many other real-time content management tools.

Who said content delivery had to be expensive? If that’s what you’ve heard, you may

have been misinformed. Or it’s possible you’ve been talking to CDNs running archaic

networks, utilizing outdated technologies, and to those that have failed to update and

optimize their networks for today’s content delivery requirements. These CDNs incur

higher network operating costs. If a network is expensive for a CDN to operate, it’s

bound to be more expensive for you to use. Ask every CDN you’re considering about the

growth and evolution of their network, and how often they invest in it. If a CDN invests

little to no money into their network infrastructure, consider it a big red flag. Also, ask if

they have in-house software developers and technical engineers whose sole job it is to

create and implement new technologies that optimize network operations.

9

Highwinds® Instant Gratification™Comes with a Low Price Tag.

Low Cost. Does It Really Exist?

We offer some of the lowest CDN prices around. This really is because of the way our network was built and how we continue to optimize it. Our network is global, flexible and scalable. We own and operate it ourselves. We have data centers and PoPs everywhere. It peers with tens of thousands of other networks, extending content delivery to the far reaches of the globe. We invest into our network operations daily, and some of the industry’s best technologies run on it. Our team of brilliant technology strategists, architecture engineers and software developers have built (and continue to build) all sorts of technologies that monitor and optimize content delivery across our network. These technologies help us keep our costs down. We save, you save.

Why is it that, sometimes, when we set out to buy something, we end up with way more

than we need? You know, it’s that cool new gadget with a dozen features we’ll never use,

a pantry bursting with the last thing we needed to buy in bulk, the doodad that does

what-does-that-thing-do-again … and the CDN contract that’s too big and too rigid.

Stop! There’s no need to lock into a hefty CDN contract. Advertisers and ad networks

need a CDN that can roll with the shifting tides. Don’t be duped into signing a contract

that doesn’t provide for flexibility and scalability.

10

Highwinds®Instant Gratification™is Flexible and Scalable.

Flexible Terms. Say No To Hefty Contracts.

No hefty contracts here! We understand that CDN requirements can be difficult to predict, and success rates on different ad campaigns are erratic at best. No, one size doesn’t fit all. We’re all about flexible terms and scalable contracts, pay-as-you-grow pricing, and CDN engagements that are as unique as every single one of our customers. Oh, and we’re also not afraid to prove ourselves first. We know our CDN is the best and the fastest, but you don’t have to take our word for it. Are you interested in test-driving Highwinds CDN? Ask us for a free trial today.

“We evaluated all of the top-tier CDNs that had experience in the

delivery of rich media assets, and Highwinds outperformed them all.

Perhaps more importantly, Highwinds out-serviced the other CDNs.

Highwinds has many internal resources to help build and optimize

solutions, and a transparent management team that gets involved.

That hands-on, always-accessible level of service is what so clearly

sets them apart from other CDNs.”

Farhad Massoudi, Founder and CEO of adRise

Highwinds Online Advertising Customers

Contact Highwinds for a Free TrialClick here to visit http://www.highwinds.com/contact