Farm Journal’s Digital Ad Space Value Skyrockets with DataDome

The problem: Regular downtime, ineffective bot protection

Farm Journal operates a vast array of media products for the US agricultural market, including more than a dozen websites specializing in areas such as row crops, pork, beef, or ag retail. Some sites are subscription-based, others drive revenue through digital advertising — but all are targets for web scrapers and other bad bots.

“The amount of malicious bot traffic we were getting would bring down my sites on a regular basis,” says Daniel Jallits, Director Development and Applications at Farm Journal. “The volume varied, but on the most hit sites, bad bots could make up as much as 40% of the total traffic.”

Naturally, the team were considering how to prevent vulnerability scanning, but the issue ran deeper than this. To protect their digital assets from the unrelenting scraper bots, vulnerability scanners and DDoS attacks, Dan and his team implemented a bot protection solution from a well-known Magic Quadrant website security provider. Unfortunately, it did not deliver the expected results.

“The tool required a lot of tailoring, and was just too hard to manage,” Dan observes. “Our team of developers and project managers is very small, and we didn’t have the body count to support it. I need a solution where I can drop in and take a look once a week, and maybe fine-tune as needed, but which can run on its own most of the time.”

The solution: Advanced AI-powered bot detection

As it happened, both Dan and one of his peers were familiar with DataDome from previous companies. Confident that it could do what they needed, they decided to replace their existing solution as soon as the one-year commitment was over.

“My life became infinitely better,” Dan laughs. “And I don’t say that lightly. I don’t really like paying for digital services; I’m a developer by nature, and I like to build my own stuff. But I could never have built anything like DataDome. The AI behind the tool is far superior to our previous solution, lightyears ahead really, and it solved pretty much all my problems from day one.”

The Farm Journal team chose the AWS Lambda approach, which simplifies integration to the extreme. “It was literally just putting the AWS Lambda function in place, and then allow-listing our partners,” Dan confirms.

The results: 100% uptime, clean traffic, and boosted ad revenue

Today, the DataDome solution automatically detects and blocks all malicious traffic to Farm Journal’s websites, with multiple benefits.

“Bad bot traffic was my number one worry for a long time. Now, it’s not even in the top five”, Dan observes. “My uptime is infinitely better than it used to be; not once have bots taken down one of my sites since we implemented DataDome. To be able to just move this off my plate, let the tool run and focus my energy on revenue-generating tasks, that’s what’s been most important.”

Speaking of revenue generation: by efficiently filtering out all automated traffic, the solution has also helped Farm Journal significantly boost their digital ad revenue.

“The value of our digital ad space has just skyrocketed since we put DataDome in,” Dan confirms. “I can guarantee to our advertisers that it’s human eyes looking at their ads, not just some bot. As a result, we’re a much more valued place to put advertising today than we were previously.”

Finally, he appreciates his excellent, but low-touch, relationship with DataDome.

“Unlike the previous vendor, which would constantly try to upsell me on the next thing—I wish more companies understood how much of a negative impact that has—DataDome just does what it advertises,” he compliments. “Most of the time, I wouldn’t even know it’s there if it weren’t for the email reports. From time to time, I’ll get a notification: ‘hi there, this just happened, but it didn’t affect your sites’, and that’s exactly what I want.”