StubHub Finds Ticket to Effective Digital Asset Management with

“ Cloudinary has created a no-fail, self-service system for brand, partners and event teams to

use our content correctly. This is critical. Our images previously were not safe, because they

were available through an open developer portal accessible by anyone with an API key.”

–Susan Stieglitz, Head of Imagery

StubHub Finds Ticket to Effective Digital

Asset Management with Cloudinary

Results

Up to 60 percent reduction in page weight

Up to 6x faster image load times

Three to four times faster page load

Solution

As StubHub evolved from a lightweight website to one that was

rich with images, videos and custom views from seat locations

at event venues around the world, it sought a way to streamline

image management. The company implemented Cloudinary,

which enabled it to signicantly reduce the time required to

manually edit images, while ensuring that the key focal points

of each image were viewable in more than 30 viewports across

a multitude of devices. Cloudinary’s digital asset management

capabilities also have helped StubHub better protect its

content, creating a single repository that ensures developers

and designers have access to only the most current images

and understand the associated brand guidelines.

Case Study

Company

StubHub is the world’s largest ticket marketplace with tickets available for more than 10 million live sports, music, and

theatre events in 40+ countries. The company enables experience-seekers to buy and sell tickets whenever and wherever

they are through its desktop and mobile interface. Owned by eBay, StubHub reinvented the ticket marketplace in 2000

and continues to lead it through innovation. StubHub’s industry rsts include the introduction of the ticketing application,

interactive seat mapping, 360-degree virtual views of seating, innovative price recommendation technology and an

algorithm that determines the best value on tickets. Most recently, StubHub expanded into more than 40 additional

markets with the acquisition of Ticketbis in May 2016.

The Challenge: Optimizing Digital Assets for Image-Rich Site

When Susan Stieglitz joined StubHub in 2015, the site was very lightweight and had few images associated with the

events being promoted. But as head of imagery, she was tasked with nding ways to make StubHub’s portal more visually

engaging, as the company expanded into more than 40 countries around the world.

That’s where the challenges began. First, she had to ensure that this imagery – which included photos, video, views from

seats and virtual views – could be easily accessed and properly displayed across multiple devices, such as desktops,

tablets and smartphones, and more than 30 different viewports. Stieglitz also had to address digital asset management,

since StubHub worked with licensed content from partners and often had requests by third-party marketers to use the

site’s images.

“ All of our images required manual editing, severely limiting the potential for innovation in experience design.

We prioritized editing for a desktop view, so the images may or may not look good in other viewports.”

–Susan Stieglitz, Head of Imagery

Case Study

In addition, StubHub had to contend with the sheer scale of managing more than 120,000 active events on the site at any

given time, and between 800 and 1,200 new ones being published every day. StubHub’s catalog included more than 54,000

entities with multiple images that needed to be selected, edited and updated continually.

“Delivering quality images at scale is a daunting task, particularly since our catalog has a single image for each event, that

we need to ensure displays well across all viewports,” said Stieglitz. For example, an image of Billy Idol cropped to look

good on a desktop might end up showing only his armpit when viewing it from an iPhone, or Pink’s face may be cut in half

when moving from a laptop to a tablet.

“All of our images required manual editing, severely limiting the potential for innovation in experience design,” she added.

In 2017 alone, Stieglitz’s team manually edited more than 17,000 images in Photoshop to t in the event cards in the

desktop design, which was then used in native and other viewports. “We prioritized editing for a desktop view, so the

images may or may not look good in other viewports.”

When getting images from partners, like the National Basketball Association, National Football League or others, StubHub

also wasn’t sure which specic image to request, since they needed one that would look good across various shapes,

including checkout, review and buy, grouping pages, desktop banners, event cards, native apps and the mobile web.

And nally, Stieglitz noted, it wasn’t all simply about the way images displayed. As they did a deeper dive, the StubHub

team wanted to improve the overall user experience by making the images as small in size as possible without any

perceptible loss of quality, so the site would load faster.

The Cloudinary Solution: Customizing Versions for Every Viewport and Improving

Access to Media

Cloudinary enables StubHub to use one high-resolution source image, then optimize it in endless end-user congurations

with simple parameter changes. Cloudinary dynamically selects the most efcient format, based on the end user’s device and

browser. The solution also optimizes images so StubHub pages load three to four times faster, which is particularly important

as StubHub has moved into international markets where devices may be slower or broadband access less prevalent.

Facial recognition capabilities in Cloudinary also ensure that dominant face(s) stay within all viewports, while those images

that do not include faces can benet from edge detection and entropy detection. “These features ensure that we deliver

the important part of the photo, no matter the viewport,” Stieglitz added.

About Cloudinary

Cloudinary provides a cloud-based media full-stack platformfor the world’s top brands. With ofces in the US, UK,

and Israel, Cloudinary has quickly become the de facto solution for web developers and marketers to manage images,

videos and other rich media assets and deliver an optimal end-user experience.An AWS Advanced Technology

Partner,Cloudinary has more than 5,000 customers worldwide, including AMC, Bleacher Report, Cars.com, Conde

Nast, DoorDash, Fairfax Media, Forbes, Gizmodo, GrubHub, Hinge, Indiegogo, Lululemon Athletica, Outbrain, Stitch Fix,

StubHub, Under Armour and Whole Foods Market. For more information, visit www.cloudinary.com.

Case Study

Other Cloudinary features that StubHub has found useful include:

• Transformations – Allows teams to apply artwork styles, incorporate logos, remove backgrounds, and add tints,

color enhancements or borders

• URL customization – Improves SEO ranking with meaningful image lenames within the URL

• Analytics – to learn where end users are clicking

StubHub also uses Cloudinary’s platform for digital asset management. Through Cloudinary, StubHub can maintain better

control over partners assets, host brand identity guidelines and logos, provide buildable templates for asset creation and

establish permission-based folders with access determined by group roles and individual user types. Cloudinary’s digital

asset management capabilities enable StubHub to have a single location where it can keep all updates in sync and add

metadata to images to identify protected assets.

“Cloudinary has created a no-fail, self-service system for brand, partners and event teams to use our content correctly,”

Stieglitz noted. “This is critical. Our images previously were not safe, because they were available through an open

developer portal accessible by anyone with an API key.”

The Results

Using Cloudinary, StubHub was able to reduce an image of Tim McGraw from 1.2 MB to 8kb, signicantly improving

page load performance. Similarly, StubHub reduced an image of Shakira from 25kb to 10kb, speeding download from

336ms to 51ms.

On average, StubHub achieved page weight reductions of up to 60 percent, and improved image load times by up to 6x.

“ These features ensure that we deliver the important part of the photo, no matter the viewport.”

–Susan Stieglitz, Head of Imagery