Le Parisien Regulates Bot Traffic With DataDome

Its reader community is unusually active, both in the site’s own comment section and on social media. In addition to the umbrella brand Le Parisien, the media house also runs several other portals for specific reader segments. Its platforms range from classic web portal and mobile site to web TV and mobile application.

The problem: Content theft & parasitized syndication

“We first became aware of the bot traffic problem in 2013,” explains Caroline de La Vèze, Head of Content Syndication at Le Parisien. “It was brought to our attention by FEVeM, an industry association for media monitoring companies, with whom we have established a commercial relationship.”

Content syndication is an important source of revenue for Le Parisien, La Vèze explains. FEVeM was worried about unfair competition from certain companies that were using scraper bots to collect editorial content on the internet and which, unlike FEVeM’s members, didn’t pay any royalties to the publishers.

“I put myself in the buyers’ place: given the choice between a media monitoring service which plays by the rules and another, illicit but less expensive, I can understand the temptation. But we needed to do something.”

Le Parisien first considered taking legal action, but it would be a slow and costly process. They had to find another, more efficient solution.

The solution: DataDome blocks unauthorized crawlers

Caroline de La Vèze first met DataDome at a conference organized by Geste, a consortium of online content and service providers.

Fabien Grenier, CEO and cofounder of DataDome, was explaining how he had decided to make use of his experience with bots from his previous social listening company to offer a complete solution for managing non-human traffic.

And indeed, the vision DataDome was proposing, which includes not only blocking the bots, but also identifying them in order to initiate commercial discussions with their operators, seemed promising.

Installing the DataDome solution was effortless, and the team could instantly see, in real time, which bots were visiting the site.

Were they surprised?

“Yes and no. We have our infrastructure data, and of course we were suspecting that there were plenty of visitors who shouldn’t be there. But to see them all listed on our dashboard like that, and especially to notice certain brands you would expect better from … well, help yourselves! We have a robots.txt which clearly states ‘You’re not allowed to access,’ but they were all there.”

From then on, the DataDome solution’s credibility was established. The next step was to identify all the legitimate partners who were using bots to collect content, in order to make sure they would still be able to access the site once the protection was activated.

“It was a big job. We exported the list of known bots, and shared it with all the relevant departments,” Caroline de La Vèze elaborates. “We asked them to identify our legitimate and active partners, making clear that everyone else would be blocked by default.”

Once the protection was activated, it turned out that a few partners had changed their IP addresses without giving notice, and as a result they were blocked. Luckily, it’s easy to give instant access to individual bots via the DataDome dashboard: access was granted with a single click.

The results: Healthier traffic, fair competition

Where has Le Parisien seen the greatest impact of the DataDome protection?

“First and foremost, in terms of hosting,” says Caroline de La Vèze. “We had much higher costs than we should have had, and DataDome helped reduce the unwanted load. Even before all of our assets were protected, we saw a 10% drop in traffic. Protecting our applications also improved application stability.”

Thanks to its high-performing SEO, Le Parisien has never experienced any serious problems with their content being duplicated elsewhere. With regards to syndication, on the other hand, the benefits of blocking unwanted bots is clear.