Intelligent Tech Channels Issue 02 | Page 30

FUTURE TECHNOLOGY Cloud simplifying image management for online retailers Managing images by size and format through cloud based solutions are helping online retailers to improve the mobile experience for customers. Jason Miller from Akamai shares a deep dive. I s a picture really worth a thousand words? Judging by the current explosive growth of images on the Internet, a picture may be worth much more than a thousand words. Consider Facebook, the social media giant, which stores more than 250 billion user generated photos, and the fact that an average web page now contains 60 images. One of the reasons for the growth in images on the web is that users love images. Look at the growth of Instagram, it has over 40 billion images shared. For online retailers, images are the first thing that grabs a shopper’s attention, 30 Mobile traffic now accounts for over 38% of traffic on the Akamai platform driving that first impression of the brand and the products. Being able to provide consumers with high quality and engaging product images, with multiple and alternate views and zooms, is one of the key ways to increase conversions. This value is outlined in many different tests, showing larger images increased conversion by 9%. These are all contributing factors to the increase in the proliferation and size of images, which has grown dramatically from 0.47 MB in 2011 to 1.53 MB in 2016, measuring the average bytes per page by content type. An increase in size by 3.25X. These have also caused many different headaches for online retailers and strained their digital asset management solutions. And, we have not even mentioned mobile or responsive web design yet. Issue 02 INTELLIGENT TECH CHANNELS