Akamai Dominates This Market Segment by a Long Shot

When it comes to popular Internet companies like Linkedin, Pinterest, Airbnb, & so on, smaller CDNs like Cachefly, or startup CDNs like Fastly, have a decent shot at winning the business against Akamai. Internet companies are all about performance, features, bells & whistles. If they like a CDN, for whatever reason, and they are not in an exclusive contract, they’ll sign up quickly without any red tape.

However, there is one very big market that Akamai dominates, by a long shot, the Fortune 500. My guess is Akamai owns about 95%+ of this market. I personally don’t see any startup CDNs or even bigger CDNs winning against Akamai in this market (I’ll cover “why” in another post). Sometimes there are CDNs, other than Akamai, throwing big names out there as clients, but I don’t count delivering video for a department within a Fortune 500, as owning that relationship.

There is one measure that clearly identifies ownership of that Fortune 500 account, delivering the main domain like www.ford.com. Here is a random sample of Fortune 500 companies whose products I’m using at home. I did a trace route on the main domain, and Akamai owned 100%. This is nothing new, I knew this four years ago. Below is a random sample I selected out of the air, based on no criteria.

Sample of Fortune 500 Accounts

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