Barstool Sports Cuts Costs by 70% with Keebo’s Automated Optimizations
Barstool Sports is a digital media company that delivers content centered around news, pop culture, and sports happenings. The web- based company creates exclusive content around a variety of topics and across media, including blogs, podcasts, and videos. Headquartered in New York City, Barstool Sports employs over 600 individuals and has garnered major investments from Penn National Gaming and The Chernin Group. The brand engages with over 66 million unique users each month, making customer and visitor engagement a priority for monitoring and maximizing.
RESULTS
60%
Savings on Direct Application Connections
70%
Savings on Customer Engagement Application Use
0
System Downtime or Disruption
34%
Reduction on Snowflake Credits
CHALLENGES
Barstool Sports implemented Snowflake, Looker, and AWS data analytics tools to provide a better self-service experience for its internal users. However, the growing number of dashboards and dynamic filters for content management and customer engagement led to increasing Snowflake usage. Snowflake was also used by management to analyze website traffic logs and conduct deeper marketing analysis. By understanding customer traffic metrics, the team could provide better content that was more in line with user interests and thereby improve their engagement. The team needed a solution that could reduce the engineering cycles needed to manage queries as well as help manage mounting Snowflake costs.
Managing user access and queries
Barstool Sports’ unique operations structure included curated dashboards with different filters for different teams, all accessible by end users through an in-house content management system. However, the number of queries was beginning to skyrocket.
Scaling team resources
The data team at Barstool Sports was overwhelmed by the number of queries and warehouse optimization tasks needed to keep things on track. With only 15 engineers and a data team of 9 individuals, they needed technical reinforcements that could help with alleviating strain on internal resources.
Reducing operational costs
Snowflake was pivotal for gaining cross channel insights into customer engagement, but Snowflake usage costs were becoming unsustainable with exponentially growing data sources.
It was a really easy decision for us to trial and keep Keebo in our infrastructure because of how easy it was to integrate and how ” immediate and apparent the benefits were.
NICK BOOTH
HEAD OF BACKEND ENGINEERING, BARSTOOL SPORTS
SOLUTION
Keebo optimized Snowflake warehouses for Barstool Sports in real time, making it easier for the engineering team to implement solutions for internal stakeholders based on data already on hand. With Keebo, Barstool Sports was able to optimize their usage, achieve significant savings, and benefit from real-time optimizations all without undertaking any major changes.
Further, Keebo was able to integrate directly with Snowflake without disturbing existing processes or functions. “Knowing how Keebo was going to work gave me confidence that the changes I made were not going to disrupt workflows or data integrity,” according to Nick Booth, Head of Backend Engineering.
With Keebo, we can focus on delivering about costs. value instead” of spending time worrying “ It was a really easy decision for us to trial and keep Keebo in our infrastructure because of how easy it was to integrate and how ” immediate and apparent the benefits were.
NICK BOOTH
HEAD OF BACKEND ENGINEERING, BARSTOOL SPORTS
Improved engagement
“We’ve seen 50% to 70% savings on our customer engagement application usage. Without Keebo, the cost of this particular product would be unsustainable,” explained Booth. Barstool Sports was able to explore new solutions and ways to engage with their audience based on the data without incurring significant costs or spending their own engineering cycles.
Refocused business priorities
Not only was the team able to get Keebo up and running to optimize their instance of Snowflake with minimal effort, it also helped them realize new offerings for the future. Keebo helped Barstool Sports gain a better sense of the data that they were using as well as its associated cost. “At Barstool our #1 priority is delivering high-value strategic features to the business on a tight timeline,” shared Booth. “With Keebo, we can focus on delivering value instead of spending time worrying about costs. It helped us to be confident we can deliver more complicated and compute-intensive features.”
Easy implementation
The Barstool Sports team found the ease of implementation helpful given their short-staffed data resources. “It was a really easy decision for us to trial and keep Keebo because of how easy it was to integrate and how immediate and apparent the benefits were,” said Booth. “It is easy for someone who is not a full-time data engineer to get started.”
