India's Largest Publisher Unlocks Behavioral Insight With MongoDB-Powered Real Time Analytics Engine

NEW DELHI, INDIA--(Marketwired - Feb 11, 2016) - MongoDB, the database for giant ideas, today announced that the largest news publisher in India uses MongoDB to power its editorial analytics engine, driving deeper user engagement with its content.

Times Internet Limited (TIL) web properties are among the fastest growing web and mobile based networks in the world. TIL hosts the online presence of 22 publications, including the Times of India, and supports more than 150 million visitors generating in excess of 2 billion page views monthly. MongoDB has become the default database for all projects at TIL.

TIL's editorial engine analyzes user behavior for every published story, providing feedback on how stories are consumed through web heat-maps and analytics dashboards. Site editors gain insights into the length of time spent per page, how content is shared and where readers focus their attention. The analytics generated by MongoDB enable editorial staff to make data-driven decisions, improving future content to better address reader preferences, including tweaking headlines and moving copy. TIL's engine also provides unique content recommendations for readers, based on browsing habits. These features ensure the sites' articles are reaching and engaging with the broadest possible audience.

Built on MongoDB, the application initially aimed to take advantage of how quickly developers could work with the database. The team also found that MongoDB seamlessly scaled and offered a flexible schema, enabling additional application functionality to be easily accommodated, even while running in production.

"We don't ask, 'why MongoDB?' Now we ask, 'why would we use anything else?'" explained Gagan Bajpai, Vice President at Times Internet Limited.

"Developer velocity is what I am focused on. How fast can we get this robust application live in the shortest amount of time? Our team built this engine in a fraction of the time it would have taken on any other database and then it scaled beautifully to help us understand and engage with millions of readers," added Bajpai.

TIL also relies on MongoDB to power applications such as the social platform that covers all its web properties, the content management system journalists use to upload stories and the e-commerce division on the sites. It's a constantly growing deployment that is currently scaled across nearly 50 MongoDB nodes explained Gyan Mittal, Senior Manager Central Technical Team, Times Internet Limited.

Live since 2011, TIL's user analytics application uses MongoDB aggregation framework to execute powerful queries that drive visualizations and statistical models. This includes around 6 million aggregations across 2TB of data per day.

Virendra Agarwal, Technology Manager at Times Internet Limited, added, "It was a classic big data problem. A huge volume of data, a wide variety of data types and all coming in at an incredible velocity. On the flip side, we had demanding managers looking to understand quickly how our readers are engaging with the news. MongoDB was the solution that helped us turn heavy raw data into actionable insights that are fundamentally changing the way we deliver the news."

The analytics application has become so critical for editorial staff that TIL now uses MongoDB Production Support. Beyond simple break and fix services, production support provides regular check-ins with MongoDB engineers to review schema design, replication strategies and system optimization.

Resources:

• Read more about how Times Internet Limited uses MongoDB in our Leaf in the Wild series
  
  

About Times Internet Limited
Times Internet, the largest Indian Internet Network is the digital venture of Times of India Group, India's largest media and entertainment group. TIL websites are among the fastest growing Web / Mobile based networks worldwide. Since its inception in 1999, Times Internet has led the Internet revolution in India and has emerged as India's foremost web entity, running diverse portals and niche websites.

About MongoDB
By offering the best of traditional databases as well as the flexibility, scale and performance today's applications require, we let innovators deploy applications as big as they can possibly dream. From start-ups to enterprises, for the modern and the mission-critical, MongoDB is the database for giant ideas. For more information, visit www.mongodb.com.