ScoopWhoop: Enhancing a media platform with Google Cloud to deliver viral content to millions of fans
About ScoopWhoop
Founded in 2013, ScoopWhoop Media is an internet media company that creates viral content, from listicles to memes, across its online, mobile, and social channels. The brand engages with a young audience aged 13–35 through its different channels. From social and creator-driven brands such as ScoopWhoop Unscripted which covers news, politics, and documentaries, and OK Tested with its lighthearted lifestyle content, to ScoopWhoop Hindi that reaches a larger regional demographic, ScoopWhoop's business is driven through advertising and branded content and has successfully partnered with several of India's largest and most influential youth brands.
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Contact usScoopWhoop delivers viral content to millions of fans, leveraging Google Kubernetes Engine and Compute Engine to autoscale cloud resources, Cloud CDN to accelerate content delivery, and BigQuery to deliver actionable insights to advertisers.
Google Cloud results
- Improves uptime to 99% on Google Kubernetes Engine, so viewers enjoy frictionless access to their favorite content
- Speeds up page loads by 30% with Cloud CDN for a positive user experience on any device
- Increases query performance with BigQuery by 50% to support data-driven decisions
Reduce 50% of cloud costs with autoscaling capabilities
From articles with titles like “16 fan-favorite cult movies you didn’t know were copied” to videos such as “Thoughts you had on your first day of internship,” ScoopWhoop Media attracts 380 million monthly views from millennial and Gen Z internet users. The media company operates multiple brands, including ScoopWhoop.com for lighthearted news and entertainment, OK Tested, an app for quizzes with friends, and Unscripted for documentaries and current affairs. ScoopWhoop’s content strategy is summed up by its mantra, “If it’s on ScoopWhoop, it’s trending.”
“We’re constantly challenging ourselves to do better at ScoopWhoop. This means an ongoing effort to improve our processes and infrastructure for growth and new business opportunities. Developers are motivated to innovate on Google Cloud because deployments don’t fail. What works on their machine is replicated on the cloud.”
—Piyush Yadav, Head of Technology, ScoopWhoopFor a smooth user experience, ScoopWhoop continuously improves its infrastructure on Google Cloud so customers can view and share content across online and mobile platforms. The company migrated from 100+ VMs from its legacy cloud provider to Compute Engine in 2020 and continues to leverage more of Google Kubernetes Engine (GKE) to develop applications faster. It deployed BigQuery for analytics to uncover insights from data and deliver products and content that customers want.
“We’re constantly challenging ourselves to do better at ScoopWhoop. This means an ongoing effort to improve our processes and infrastructure for growth and new business opportunities,” says Piyush Yadav, Head of Technology at ScoopWhoop. “Developers are motivated to innovate on Google Cloud because deployments don’t fail. What works on their machine is replicated on the cloud.”
“Autoscaling on GKE helps us to match capacity with real-time demand. The result is 99% uptime and a 50% reduction in infrastructure costs while removing operational burdens. We can invest more time on coding and less on managing resources.”
—Piyush Yadav, Head of Technology, ScoopWhoopEnabling innovation with a scalable, cost-effective infrastructure
It’s hard to predict when a ScoopWhoop meme or video will go viral, but when it happens, traffic increases as much as 100x when people click or share the content. Previously, ScoopWhoop provisioned VMs with excess capacity to prevent downtime from traffic spikes. This approach meant the company incurred unnecessary costs from idle VMs when traffic returned to normal.
“Autoscaling on GKE helps us to match capacity with real-time demand. The result is 99% uptime and a 50% reduction in infrastructure costs while removing operational burdens,” says Yadav. “We can invest more time on coding and less on managing resources.”
ScoopWhoop’s shift to GKE allows for faster deployment and development. The team releases two updates per day to improve app performance and introduce new features such as livestreaming on Unscripted and video calling on OK Tested that keep customers coming back for more.
Connecting millions of viewers to viral content
Users on mobile devices make up 80% of sessions on ScoopWhoop. For mobile users in rural areas, data-intensive content such as videos may load slowly because of poor internet connections.
To serve customers across different parts of the country and around the world, ScoopWhoop uses Cloud CDN to speed up content delivery through a globally distributed network of servers. So if someone in Singapore clicks on ScoopWhoop’s content hosted in India, for example, the request is routed to the closest edge server to minimize latency.
“We have only milliseconds to grab customers’ attention as they enter our website or open our app. If the app crashes or a video buffers, customers may leave our platform and view the content elsewhere,” says Yadav. “Cloud CDN improves our page load time by 30%, so customers view and search content with ease, regardless of their device or location.”
ScoopWhoop also uses Memorystore for Redis to speed up application performance by storing frequently accessed data. When customers click on the requested content, that data is readily available in the cache, so the application doesn’t have to retrieve it from the host server.
“BigQuery is the foundation of our data analytics strategy. Compared to our legacy platform, BigQuery’s support for real-time data speeds up queries by 50%. Accelerating data insights helps advertisers understand their audience on ScoopWhoop and where to allocate marketing dollars for optimal results.”
—Piyush Yadav, Head of Technology, ScoopWhoopHelping advertisers tell brand stories that resonate with millennials
Thanks to ScoopWhoop’s influence with millennials, brands can effectively target younger consumers with snackable, fast-paced content featuring their product or services. From quizzes to videos, the creative team helps clients develop content projects that appeal to their target audience and drive results.
ScoopWhoop gives advertisers a real-time view of how their campaigns are performing by using Google Analytics to measure campaign outcomes through the number of views, likes, and other engagement metrics. Taking analytics a step further, ScoopWhoop uses BigQuery for user segmentation and profiling and video insights to help advertisers answer questions such as “Who are the different types of audience across the ScoopWhoop network? and “How do video viewing habits change across devices and channels?”
“BigQuery is the foundation of our data analytics strategy. Compared to our legacy platform, BigQuery’s support for real-time data speeds up queries by 50%,” says Yadav. “Accelerating data insights helps advertisers understand their audience on ScoopWhoop and create audience-driven content to drive better results.”
Simplifying communication with Google Workspace in-person video
Internally, ScoopWhoop has a culture of cross-team collaboration that’s typical for digital publishers. The content, sales, and engineering teams work together to prioritize what brings value to the platform. Google Workspace collaboration tools such as Google Meet for online meetings and Google Sheets for spreadsheets help employees stay connected while working from home because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
Whether it is an editorial meeting to assign stories or a status update for new features, employees can easily start an impromptu meeting from Gmail or schedule an advance meeting via Google Calendar. Compared to other video-conference apps, employees preferred Meet's user-friendly features such as the tiled layout to see all participants at once and call notification from Meet on a preferred device.
Yadav shared the example of how ScoopWhoop sped up project management, with the help of Sheets. Typically, a search engine optimization (SEO) project involves collaboration between web development, product, and marketing to integrate optimization into web design. Instead of managing project tasks via email, the SEO manager simply shares a Sheets file with the necessary deliverables and deadlines to accurately track project status and comments from different individuals. With Sheets, something that typically takes months can now be done in just a few weeks.
Machine learning for personalized content to drive traffic growth
Whether it’s for restaurant recommendations for a food delivery app or hotel recommendations on a travel website, personalization helps brands drive sales by giving customers more of what they like.
Likewise, ScoopWhoop is working on a machine learning algorithm on Google Cloud to deliver relevant stories to specific audiences, instead of recommending the same content to all customers. The algorithm will analyze data points such as the user’s browsing history, content engagement, and contextual demographic data to understand what’s relevant to the person based on their age, gender, employment, and so on.
“We're focused on executing a data-driven content strategy to outpace our competition and grow revenue for our advertisers,” says Yadav. “With Google Cloud, we can analyze more data to quickly deliver better content, richer features, and smarter algorithms to help us accomplish this goal.”
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About ScoopWhoop
Founded in 2013, ScoopWhoop Media is an internet media company that creates viral content, from listicles to memes, across its online, mobile, and social channels. The brand engages with a young audience aged 13–35 through its different channels. From social and creator-driven brands such as ScoopWhoop Unscripted which covers news, politics, and documentaries, and OK Tested with its lighthearted lifestyle content, to ScoopWhoop Hindi that reaches a larger regional demographic, ScoopWhoop's business is driven through advertising and branded content and has successfully partnered with several of India's largest and most influential youth brands.