When we started our journey in 2012, we were looking to improve our lives as developers by making it easier for us to handle the arduous tasks of handling images and videos in our code. That initial line of developer code has evolved into a full suite of media experience solutions driven by a mission that gradually revealed itself over the course of the past 10 years: help companies unleash the full potential of their media to create the most engaging visual experiences.

Martin Giles at Forbes wrote a great article this week that highlights key milestones on this journey, including our new investment partnership with Blackstone.

We’re really excited to welcome Blackstone Growth to the Cloudinary family. Blackstone has invested in a secondary funding round that values the company at $2 billion. For those wondering, a secondary round means Blackstone is buying shares directly from our employees’ vested options. As a bootstrapped company it’s a benefit we’re proud to extend to our employees. To have a partner of Blackstone’s caliber is an honor, and a testament to the value we offer our customers.

Why Cloudinary? Why now?

Visuals have long held a power beyond words. From the world’s first known photograph, taken nearly 200 years ago, to this past weekend’s Super Bowl ads, visuals have captivated us, inspired us, and connected us. So it’s no wonder that in today's digital world, visual content is incredibly important for companies to do right.

Creating and delivering these visual experiences quickly at scale is critical to all online businesses, yet it’s not as easy as it looks. Behind every visual interaction is a brand working incredibly hard to ensure the experience is fast and flawless, and often personalized. What was once just really hard is now extremely complex, difficult to get right, too costly to get wrong, and rarely your core know-how.

Cloudinary’s AI-powered approach to media management makes it possible for brands to deliver the engaging, digital experiences they dream about without the operational inefficiencies and headaches.

With more than a million users and nearly 10,000 customers across all industries, including Nintendo, Neiman Marcus, NBC, Tesla, and Uber, it’s not unusual to experience Cloudinary every day. Our suite of media experience solutions manages more than 60 billion assets—and often more than 100 million assets every day.

It’s an exciting time for our customers and our team to say the least. As we approach our 10th anniversary, we are proud of what we have accomplished and look forward to working with you to help you unleash the full potential of your media. And in many ways, it feels like we’re just getting started.

What are you waiting for? Join us!

When brands like you adopt a direct–to-consumer (DTC) e-commerce approach with no involvement of retailers or marketplaces, you gain direct and timely insight into evolving shopping behaviors. Accordingly, you can accommodate shoppers’ preferences by continually adjusting your product offering and interspersing the shopping journey with moments of excitement and intrigue. Opportunities abound for you to cultivate engaging customer relationships.

Key to embracing DTC is an awareness of its growth potential, as reflected by eye-opening statistics like these, as reported by eMarketer:

• DTC e-commerce sales grew by roughly 20 billion transactions in 2021, a 15.9% increase from 2020.
• Four out of 10 U.S. internet shoppers will make at least 40% of their purchases from DTC brands in the next five years.

To keep up with DTC’s exponential growth, besides staying alert to your competitors’ moves for gaining market share, be sure to also look into the shopping experiences those companies are iterating, especially their techniques of promoting merchandise and of simplifying and speeding up the checkout process.

This post describes a few significant, DTC-centric trends and suggests ways to build and deliver stellar and unique visual experiences for e-commerce.

Brands Have Diversified to Reach Shoppers

Most likely, given the fine-tuning and adaptations you’ve made over time based on shopper feedback, the products you initially offered for sale look very different today. You might even have branched out into brick-and-mortar retail through either partnerships with other sellers or your own physical store.

In one of the eMarketer articles I referred to above are examples of other brands, one of them a Cloudinary customer, diversifying the way in which to reach consumers. eMarketer also reports, “[To] evolve along with customer needs, footwear brand Allbirds and eyewear provider Warby Parker have brick-and-mortar stores to bring customers offline. Quip partners with existing brick-and-mortars, like Target, to sell products. Many D2Cs have also expanded beyond their initial hero offerings: Allbirds now sells apparel, and men’s razor company Harry’s has deodorant available.”

Instead of in-store shopping, consumers might desire a revamped, more streamlined, dynamic online experience, which you can build with optimized visuals.

Brands Should Optimize and Personalize Visuals for an Omnichannel Experience

Reality is, the younger generation is spending most of their time on mobile devices. In fact, more than 25% of Millennials are on three or more devices at once, a whopping 130% increase year over year. Since online diversification means that you must deliver captivating visual experiences to all touchpoints (channels, devices, browsers), a prerequisite is to maintain and optimize visual assets for a flawless performance there.

Furthermore, given the mention in a Forrester report that 61% of consumers would share more information with brands as a gesture of appreciation for an immersive shopping experience, consider adding a personalization capability. Such a feature promises to be a two-way win. According to MarketingTech, “personalization based upon the personal preferences or recorded behavior of consumers performed on average three times better than untargeted strategies,” which attests to the fact that shoppers welcome personalization.

Bottom line: The most successful DTC brands this year will be those that make the online experience—and its corresponding visuals—specific to the shopper who is browsing.

DTC Brands Must Opt for Intelligent Automation of Visuals

Recall the traditional process of launching products or seasonal offering: the heavy lifting and long hours spent in performing the photoshoot, culling through assets, and transforming them into every size and version needed for desktop, mobile, and social. As your brand grows, so does your media workflow, which becomes increasingly complex with multiple teams involved. To continue to deliver optimized images and videos to highly visual, digital channels, you must streamline that workflow. Also, by seeking out effective technologies and capabilities, you can deliver consistent DTC experiences no matter where shoppers interact.

A platform like Cloudinary, replete with robust artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) capabilities, automates workflows, enabling you to efficiently transform and deliver visuals. Notably, you can do the following with Cloudinary:

• Auto-crop, auto-tag, and auto-transform media assets, e.g., resize them or remove their backgrounds, saving a load of time and manual effort.
• Apply content-aware compression or cropping of videos and images through intelligent automation, launching products online in minutes only.
• Personalize at scale to deliver customized shopping experiences, which often boost conversions.

Take, for example, Reformation, which faced the challenge of optimally delivering images to all viewing devices and solving the issue of choppy videos on its e-commerce site. Shortly after integrating Cloudinary into its media workflow, Reformation was able to deliver high-quality, fast-loading photos and videos for various devices and bandwidths, which has led to a 31% reduction in overall page-load time and a 67% decrease in bounce rates. For more details, see this case study.

Automating DTC Visuals With Cloudinary Is the Way to Go

You’re by far not alone in having to grapple with media-management challenges for e-commerce. By partnering with Cloudinary to automate the processing of your DTC visuals, you’ll be in good company. Cloudinary’s Media Experience Platform offers use cases that shine a light on how to diversify the shopper experience, complete with optimized and impressive imagery and video. Contact us to learn more.

No matter your business focus—public service, B2B integration, recruitment—multimedia, in particular video, is remarkably effective in communicating with the audience. Before, making video accessible to diverse viewers involved tasks galore, such as eliciting the service of production studios to manually dub, transcribe, and add subtitles. Those operations were costly and slow, especially for globally destined content.

It’s now a different story with cloud-based tools and services, which enable international outreach for enterprises and small businesses alike. Noteworthy are machine-learning tools that integrate the transcription process into the production cycle with a quick turnaround.

This article describes several capabilities of the Cloudinary add-on for Google’s AI Video Transcription and the Google Cloud Speech API, as follows:

• Automate translation into multiple languages.
• Generate subtitles and transcripts.
• Adjust logos and apply overlays and special effects for specific regions.

Adding Subtitles and Transcripts

Because, with subtitles, viewers can comprehend and enjoy visual content without knowing the video’s language of recording, subtitles are one of the easiest ways to make videos accessible heterogeneously. On the other hand, transcripts are extremely helpful for those who are hard of hearing or who have limited vision, for those folks can make out the text with a screen reader.

Even though Google Cloud Speech API works without Cloudinary’s add-on, it requires a much more complex configuration. Cloudinary simplifies the process by automatically generating subtitles and transcripts from the video in your account’s Media Library, after which you can display them in the video player. Furthermore, you can translate in real time the text to many supported languages with Cloudinary’s Google Translation add-ons, which can also translate your video’s metadata—title, description, tags—to facilitate search.

Those translation add-ons, each slated for a specific use, generate transcripts along with the necessary data for rendering text on screen. This example, which transcribes a President Lincoln speech, demonstrates the add-ons in action: video tagging, image moderation and enhancement, etc.

Translating Embedded Content

Even with translated audio, videos could contain language-driven information in their frames, such as road signs, whiteboards, restaurant menus, and slide presentations. Depending on how viewers interact with your media, you might need to translate that embedded content. As an integral part of video, embedded content is just as important as the primary content.

With AI-based optical character recognition (OCR) tools like Cloudinary’s OCR Text Detection and Extraction add-on, you can perform two tasks:

1. Extract frames from videos and look for translation-required content.

2. Translate the content to another language or show it as a tag because most screen readers require text with ARIA tags. Plus, the extracted text can provide more context on the video.

   For example, if your application offers a virtual environment, e.g., a restaurant, you can extract a dinner menu from the video frames and link it to the ingredients or the restaurant location. For a slide presentation, consider extracting important labels and translating them for global consumption. Whereas subtitles deliver the base-level text, translation of the embedded content yields a sense of inclusion in the entire production.

OCR tools, e.g., Google's Video Intelligence API, can even update the applicable frames in a video to display the words and other data, including metadata, in the required language.

In addition, through AI-powered models, you can convert translated text to human speech in the same pitch as that of the original speaker of a different language. Called AI dubbing or synthetic-film dubbing, this approach helps maintain quality while reaching a wider audience. Since you can acquire more computing power to translate multiple videos in parallel, AI dubbing not only saves time and cost, but also achieves more scalability.

Applying Overlays and Special Effects

Production studios often put overlays, such as text descriptions or annotations of the content in the frame, a watermark logo, or text-based special effects on top of the final cut of a video. Besides translating the content within the video frames with the techniques described above, you can also add localized overlays and watermark logos to media for each geographical region with the overlay options offered by Cloudinary’s SDK.

For example, to add a text overlay to the media content programmatically, first translate the content to the local language with Cloudinary’s add-ons, and then add the text to the video according to the production’s style and theme requirements. Such an approach saves you production-cut effort and eliminates postproduction processing.

Organizations with different brand images or names in various regions usually have different logos for the foreign markets. Through the same Cloudinary SDK, you can add logos and watermarks to media, generating localized content with the correct overlays and text.

Summing It Up

To reach an extensive, varied audience and engage them with the same video content, you must translate and internationalize the associated text. Transcripts, subtitles, translations, and regional overlays greatly enhance user experience while ensuring regional compliance. Thanks to automation, the process involved, no longer tedious and pricey as before, speeds up your production cycle. Plus, machine learning-powered models deliver expert-level results in translation, transcription, and localization at scale.

In partnership with Google, Cloudinary offers numerous capabilities that create a more accessible and scalable content library, helping you reach the broadest audience possible worldwide. For details, check out our documentation.

David first shared his thoughts at our ImageCon coverence last October and this case study is an abbreviated version of Minted’s success using Cloudinary.

Over time, Faithful renderings of the creations of the illustrators, textile designers, painters, packaging designers, marketers, and stay-at-home moms, all of whom are core contributors of the Minted world, was getting harder and harder. Legacy technology wasn’t cutting it any more—and it was time for Cloudinary to step in.

Streamlining the Image-Generation Pipeline

According to David, Cloudinary helps Minted scale its image-generation process and deliver stunning visual-content online in three ways:

• Cleaning up the image-application “zoo”: Minted’s production team was wrestling with a complex mix of old and new tools and scripts—all strung together with different streaming technologies and queuing systems—which made it increasingly difficult to maintain and which took up significant engineering resources.

• Enabling slicker photo setup: The critical first stage of capturing a design that will later become a print or the artwork on a stylish tote bag, for example, is a photoshoot in Minted’s studios. After the shoot, photographs are uploaded directly to Cloudinary, rendering ongoing edits, sizing, and deployment to web and mobile much easier.

• Simplifying image routing and management: All the matting and mounting options Minted offers users are done on Cloudinary, as well as what can be a thorny process of generating canvas close-ups with 2D and 3D mesh transforms.

Delivering Premium Quality at Scale

The case study walks you through how David and his team worked with Cloudinary to tackle their most daunting tasks of handling art. As an indication of the heavy lifting Cloudinary must do here, 59.8 million images now support 4,000 product SKUs in this core part of the Minted offering.

We’ll happily take on the next challenge from David: the even more intricate job of getting stationery images right, like capturing the “shine” that users enjoy seeing in a potential purchase. “We would love to solve this technical challenge with Cloudinary in the future,” he says. “There’s a lot more room to grow here.”

Check out David’s full ImageCon session here.

Read the full case study here to learn more.

More than 1,700 people in 107 countries registered for ImageCon 2021, which was held virtually on October 19-20. Event highlights included a keynote from the founders of Bombas, product updates from Cloudinary, a talk by Cloudinary customer lastminute.com, and the session The Future of Digital Media, hosted by Cloudinary’s cofounder and CTO Tal Lev-Ami, and VP of innovation Daniel Amitai. All ImageCon 2021 sessions are available on demand, for free, here.

ImageCon 2022, our sixth annual conference, will answer the question: “What visual media trends and changes are in store this year and beyond?” The agenda will cover industry trends, e-commerce tips, recommendations for better managing image and video projects through automation, Cloudinary’s product roadmap, and other illuminating topics. Our events team is hard at work securing speakers from within Cloudinary and from leaders at iconic brands and global publishers. It’ll be the best ImageCon yet so don’t miss it!

To learn more and sign up for updates, visit ImageCon.com and do check out the infographic below.

With the introduction of the Media Library Extension, a Chrome-browser add-on that streamlines the access to, search for, and management of images and videos, Cloudinary offers yet another effective tool for its Digital Asset Management (DAM) solution. Let’s have a look at how most teams are currently working with media assets and how the new add-on not only boosts efficiency, but also renders the process a pleasure to work with.

Old School: Lots of Juggling

Say your team creates social posts on a browser tab on an automated marketing application. To locate a media asset, you must open another tab to search for the asset within the Media Library, copy the related URL, and paste it into the app. In some cases, you even have to download an asset and then upload it into the app.

Talk about a classic example of menial, mundane, and repetitive chores! Irrecoverable is the amount of precious time spent shifting context, manually copying and pasting URLs, downloading and uploading assets, and periodically reviewing and cleaning up the downloaded ones.

New School: Fast Optimization and Simplicity

With the Media Library Extension, you stay within your app of choice with no need to switch tabs or download and upload selected assets. Choosing an item on the right-click menu instantly takes you to the Media Library to quickly search for, retrieve and edit assets, and then pull those images or asset URLs directly into your app.

As a result, creating media-fostered posts or campaigns, now an expeditious and reliable process, can conveniently occur inline.

Bonus Features

In addition, the Media Library Extension boasts three remarkable features.

Generation of Asset Variations

For consistency, your team likely follows style guidelines vis-a-vis size, logo overlay, etc. for displaying images on promotional emails. To make that job easier, the Media Library Extension's transformation feature helpfully applies the attributes you specify to all the assets retrieved through the extension.

Furthermore, you can modify the transformation settings to meet various device requirements. For example, for mobile devices, you might choose to apply portrait orientation to certain images in the Media Library Extension and save them for delivery. Likewise, set landscape orientation for those destined for other devices.

Optimization of Assets

To comply with a platform’s file-size limits, you must optimize images for the smallest possible file size without compromising their quality. That is, you must also satisfy the requirements of format, dimensions, and resolution for the content in question; the overall page design; the requesting device; and the expectations of your audience. Besides being able to optimize assets in your Media Library, you can now automate the process through the Media Library Extension. All it takes is a preselection of Auto from the Image format and Image quality dropdown menus, after which the images you import from Cloudinary through the extension will be automatically optimized and added to your posts.

One Interface for All

With the extension, you can perform almost all the tasks that you used to do in the Media Library and, gratifyingly, all in one interface without switching tabs. That’s because the extension causes the Media Library to open as a compact version within the hosting app.

For example, to fit images into an email or web template, you might need to scale or, on many occasions, crop them to spotlight the most significant part of the images. To accomplish that, simply edit the assets within the Media Library and then return them seamlessly to the hosting app.

Automatic Display of a Specified Folder

Consider this scenario: Your team is working on ads for the winter campaign, and the related assets are located in the winter-campaign/ads folder. With the Media Library Extension, you can avoid the hassle of navigating there by specifying that, at launch, the Media Library displays that folder. When the job is a wrap, you can quickly and easily choose another folder as a default display for the Media Library.

Summary

To recap, the Media Library Extension for Chrome—

• Opens the Media Library directly from your web app.
• Eliminates the need to work with multiple tabs when adding media assets to posts.
• Saves the trouble of copying and pasting asset URLs from the Media Library into your web app or downloading images from the Media Library and uploading them into the app.
• Offers innovative, quick, and simple ways to take advantage of many handy Cloudinary features.

The convenience offered by the Media Library Extension is self-evident. Selecting, editing, optimizing, or delivering assets from your marketing platform takes only one click.

As Yogi Berra once said, "Little things are big.” What could be smaller than a Chrome extension for your tech stack? The pluses afforded by that small tool could be significant beyond your expectations, however. Do give it a try today here on the Chrome Web Store and check out the documentation to learn more.

Today, I’m thrilled to announce the launch of Apps for Digital Asset Management and a Media Library Extension for the Chrome browser, which enables easy, flexible integration with all web-based applications in addition to making asset discovery more robust and accessible to all.

Apps for DAM

To realize the full potential of software, customization is a must even though it usually means additional cost and complexity. Not any more with Apps for DAM, which offers one-click access to robust capabilities for creating, processing, and managing assets tailored to your needs with the following features:

• App catalog. Prebuilt apps for automation, sharing, publication, and the like.
• Future-proof assurance. An API-based, low-maintenance capability adapted for extended use.
• Simple setup and integration. One-click installation of an intuitive interface with contextual menus and an action palette.
• Customization. Options for crafting single or multistep processes.

Media Library Extension for Chrome

Digital assets are an integral part of almost all workstreams, yet providing access within and across key business systems requires a great deal of effort and upkeep. Our new Media Library Extension for Chrome offers a simple, unified, and consistent interface within web-based apps for fast access to assets. No integration or technical expertise is required. Among the benefits are—

• Seamless integration. Full or partial access to the assets in the media library of web-based apps.
• Nontechnical setup. Simple installation, configuration, and use that requires no software prowess.
• Generation of variations. The ability to create multiple asset versions with UI-based media and transformation editors as well as library URL actions.
• Robust search. Basic, advanced, and visual search for assets within your media library and previously created collections.

On the Horizon: Natural Language Visual Search

Even though search is a key feature of an efficient DAM, search results are only as good as your metadata. No matter the size, every organization fights the losing battle of identifying and inputting the correct metadata to facilitate discovery of stored assets.

Enter Natural Language Visual Search, which creates meaningful tags of common terms by leveraging a neural network of millions of assets, greatly reducing the reliance on manual or automated entry of metadata. Among the features are—

• Relevance. The discovery of highly relevant assets based on visual content.
• Natural language. Broad and deep search terms, independent of the existing catalog’s metadata.
• Neural network. A network that’s significantly more flexible and all-encompassing than the existing models and that’s trained on a wide variety of images and natural languages.

Check out the details of Cloudinary’s DAM solution.

With building, growing, and maintaining a strong digital presence being a top priority for all brands, high-quality visual content is paramount. In fact, consumers are 40 times more likely to share visual content on social networks than on other forums. Plus, a recent study from Wyzowl found that 84% of consumers made purchase decisions after watching a video, which explains why many brands are adding more and more visual media to their sites.

However, the complexity and lengthy process of the day-to-day work associated with content creation and delivery can feel like a treacherous uphill battle. Not to mention that resource bottlenecks and the constant demand for “more content now” could cause brands to lag behind. Reality is, in light of the costs and missed growth opportunities, brands can no longer rely on antiquated tools and processes.

That’s where modern Digital Asset Management (DAM) systems come into play, with which enterprises can store, organize, search for, retrieve, share, and publish digital content through a centralized digital library. Because those systems also offer flexibility, automation, and scale in the management of media-related tasks, adopting one is a must to facilitate the creation of effective, scalable, customizable, and easy-to-use workflows.

Below are the key aspects of DAM, reimagined.

Modern DAM Systems Meet Evolving Media Needs

State-of-the-art technology is now available to reimagine DAM, eliminating redundant, low-value tasks and freeing up teams to focus on creation, innovation, and business growth. Essentially, that’s a “one asset, many variations” single-file approach with AI-powered features for streamlining workflows.

Here are the other aspects of reimagined DAM:

• A digital-first focus, which centers on management of digital formats and experiences.
• Support of work-in-progress (WIP) workflows, which enables teams to work simultaneously on variations of an idea until it is ready for delivery.
• Robust, well-documented APIs and SDKs, with which teams can access, transform, optimize, and deliver images and videos in a simple yet comprehensive manner, assured of a smooth connectivity and integration with other key business systems.
• Single-source delivery and optimization capabilities, with which teams can generate an unlimited number of asset variations during delivery.

As the digital landscape continues to morph, the above features are key to creating asset variations and keeping pace with the competition.

Automation of Asset Management Spells Ease and Scalability

Creation of online content has exploded over the last few years, with 3.2 billion images and 720,000 hours of video shared daily. However, many organizations are struggling to constantly churn out new, immersive, and meaningful content by creating, transforming, and customizing innumerable different assets to meet the demands of various properties, touchpoints, devices, and campaigns. As well, they must make changes on the fly and figure out how to render one-off assets transparent across departments. No one appreciates fire-drill tasks that burden creative professionals, especially if consideration of potential variation needs could have occurred earlier on in the workflow.

Intelligent automation is the answer to meet those needs, in particular in defining the transformations required for producing full-sized assets for all channels, devices, and platforms—in mere seconds only. Modern, automated DAM saves a tremendous load of money and time for product launches and campaigns alike.

Modern DAM’s Customization Features Serve Brands Well

Nowadays, because brands must extend their DAM features, including the ability to economically and efficiently customize assets, to meet unique workflow requirements, traditional DAM systems no longer fit the bill. What will serve those needs are bespoke, API-based, and future-proof capabilities that support a range of key file types.

Modern DAM systems offer customization features for preset renderings of multiple assets. That is, with one click, teams can immediately create and process bulk assets in addition to being able to efficiently craft single-step or multistage processes. Needless to say, low-effort, no-support, minimal-cost, and long-lasting customizations invariably boost efficiency, value, and adoption across teams and channels.

Teams Need to Be Able to Easily Define Pesky Metadata Rules

Manually defining metadata rules is difficult and tedious. Not only must the values be correct and consistent, but teams must also be able to manage the various metadata types and populate them correctly.

For a solution, brands can customize metadata with conditional rules and establish new rules as needed while building a campaign. A huge help would be a modern DAM system, through which brands can intelligently search for relevant assets with AI-generated tags, attributes, colors, faces, and such.

Modern DAM Systems Are Geared to Meet the Needs of Today and Tomorrow

For brands to stay ahead and relevant in today’s digital-first world, they must embrace a modern DAM system to publish engrossing visual content.

Cloudinary has reimagined DAM with a focus on flexibility, intelligent automation, and scale to meet the many diverse needs of the present and future. By capitalizing on Cloudinary’s modern DAM system, brands can launch dynamic visual experiences in short order, unifying teams on one platform sans complexity and functional silos. That’s speed, efficacy, productivity, and peace of mind incarnate.

For a unique perspective, check out our ImageCon 2021 session Reimagined Digital Asset Management Powered by Intelligent Automation.

As website and mobile apps rely more on visual media to create engaging user experiences, delivering strong web and app performance becomes more challenging for developers. The faster your site, the more time visitors would spend on it. Conversely, the slower the site, the higher the bounce rate, and the lower Google ranks it in SEO.

However, how much time do you really have to measure and act on performance? Would you rather trust automation and a low-code/no-code (LCNC) approach to ensure high performance or work on it manually?

Read on for a handy tip on how to speed up media-heavy websites in short order with the latest no-code media service on the block: Cloudinary’s Media Optimizer.

Get to Know Cloudinary’s Media Optimizer

Media Optimizer from Cloudinary is a tool that performs three important tasks:

1. Take your media, notably images and videos, from their existing hosting location.
2. Create an optimized version of the media on the fly.
3. Speedily deliver the media to your audience worldwide with low latency through a fast multi-CDN [content delivery network].

Have a Look at Three Use Cases

You might need to optimize your site in a jiffy under these circumstances:

• Your site engages in e-commerce and is media-heavy, which causes slow page loads. Improving the performance would involve a load of development work or manual optimization of each and every image on an image-editing software like Adobe Photoshop. You simply cannot afford the time and effort to do that.
• Slow page loads are affecting your bounce rates and SEO performance due to poor Core Web Vitals scores. As a result, your manager has requested that you optimize the company site, which boasts over hundreds or thousands of media files, in less than two days.
• You must optimize your media assets post-haste without moving them to another storage provider.

Take the Steps

Follow this procedure to accelerate page loads:

Step 1

Find out the answers to the three questions below by using Cloudinary’s Website Image Analysis Tool:

• How fast does your site load?
• What’s the page weight?
• Are you delivering images in formats optimized for all browsers?

Step 2

Sign up at Cloudinary for free to create a Media Optimizer account.

Sign Up for Cloudinary’s Media Optimizer

Step 3

Log in and click Configuration at the top and then +Add New in the screen that’s displayed. Name the new media source, select its type, and specify its URL, as shown in the screenshots below.

Add a New Media Source

Name the Media Source and Select Its Type

Enter the URL of the Media Source

You’ve now configured the new media source.

Be sure to verify your setup. Cloudinary’s Media Optimizer serves optimized media through a domain of the format https://<cloud_name>.mo.cloudinary.net, where <cloud_name> is the name you gave your Media Optimizer cloud on creation. To locate that name, click Domains on the left of your dashboard. See below.

Speed Up Your Website Immediately

For a demo, see the following:

• The original image of my website, goodheads.io: https://goodheads.io/assets/2946769/22929944/f8508ffc-f272-11e6-82f2-b3bece9473fd.png

• The optimized version of the image: https://prospermo.mo.cloudinary.net/assets/2946769/22929944/f8508ffc-f272-11e6-82f2-b3bece9473fd.png

I can now serve all the assets on my website on https://prospermo.mo.cloudinary.net without having to move them or understand how media optimization works.

Try Out the Magic

Cloudinary’s Media Optimizer gives you wings and a platform to fly—with no requirements for technical know-how or mechanics. Just get on board and fly!

For more information on the optimizer, see the following:

• Documentation
• Blog post: Get Your Media Moving Faster With Cloudinary’s New Media Optimizer

This time of year always brings with it a heavy dose of reflection.

We set big goals for ourselves in 2021 as we continued to navigate our post-pandemic reality—one that hangs on with each new variant. As Cloudinarians, we remained mindful of the effects the pandemic continued to have on us and our customers.

These past few years challenged us in new ways. Committed to living our people-first values, we remained focused on our employees and our customers, and embraced our new, more fully remote way of work. And I believe we’ve emerged stronger than before.

Together, we reached some incredible milestones over the past year, all of which make me immensely proud. We launched our first low-code/no-code product, Media Optimizer, and the market responded with rapid adoption and great feedback. We launched Cloudinary Labs and reached the one-million-user mark. We also welcomed over 1,000 new customers to a roster that now comprises nearly 9,000 and climbing.

We also reached an important financial milestone: $100 million ARR. It’s a remarkable achievement for any tech company, but the fact that we did it bootstrapped—and more than 10 months before our 10th birthday—makes even the most humble among us pretty proud. It’s an achievement only a few companies can claim, and you can read more in today’s official announcement.

We’re also excited to announce our first acquisition and are thrilled to welcome the Indivio team and its video creation product into our family. Extending Cloudinary’s offerings with Indivio’s innovative solution presents a major opportunity for anyone looking to harness the power of video to improve customer engagement.

When my co-founders and I started Cloudinary from a small office outside Tel Aviv, we felt lucky to have customers from all over the world right from the start. We knew we were solving a big problem for companies—unleashing the power of media in a world increasingly reliant on visuals for connections—and we were also aware of the luck that was good timing. Today, we have customers in more than 100 countries and nearly 400 employees across five offices in the US, UK, Israel, Poland, and Singapore.

My optimism about what this new year holds for us is rooted in gratitude for what we have accomplished to date, together with our customers and partners. As I have shared before, being a bootstrapped company affords us the privilege of working not towards maximizing shareholder value, but on maximizing our customers’ value. Our success is reliant on yours, and we take great pride in serving you. Thank you for continuing to trust us with your business. We don’t take it for granted.

Here’s to a year that’s a bit lighter than the last two. To one that carries more wins than losses for all of us. We’re looking forward to it.