{"id":9396,"date":"2026-05-09T07:24:03","date_gmt":"2026-05-09T02:24:03","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/paknews.centers.pk\/wall-street-doesnt-understand-the-cdn-business-what-ai-agentic-traffic-is-and-how-bits-are-delivered-dan-rayburn-streamingmediablog-com\/"},"modified":"2026-05-09T07:24:03","modified_gmt":"2026-05-09T02:24:03","slug":"wall-street-doesnt-understand-the-cdn-business-what-ai-agentic-traffic-is-and-how-bits-are-delivered-dan-rayburn-streamingmediablog-com","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/paknews.centers.pk\/ur\/wall-street-doesnt-understand-the-cdn-business-what-ai-agentic-traffic-is-and-how-bits-are-delivered-dan-rayburn-streamingmediablog-com\/","title":{"rendered":"Wall Street Doesn\u2019t Understand the CDN Business, What AI Agentic Traffic Is, and How Bits are Delivered \u2013 Dan Rayburn \u2013 StreamingMediaBlog.com"},"content":{"rendered":"


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Fastly\u2019s stock was down 40% on Thursday, May 7th, one day after its Q1 earnings report<\/a>, with Piper Sandler saying, \u201cThe disappointment was in the core delivery business that saw lower quarter-over-quarter volumes than most were expecting, as pricing remained stable.\u201d Who\u2019s most, and why were they expecting something different?<\/p>\n

If you talk to customers, which Wall Street doesn\u2019t, in particular, the large ones, none of them are seeing delivery volumes accelerating faster than projected. These large customers matter most to Fastly, as its top 10 customers accounted for 34% of revenue in Q1.\u00a0Customers have optimized their encoding, overall bitrates have gone down, and 4K traffic accounts for 1-2% of all bits delivered across CDNs and isn\u2019t growing. There is no catalyst in the market for Wall Street to expect volume increases quarter-to-quarter, outside of a CDN winning a new contract(s).<\/p>\n

Another Wall Street firm, KeyBanc Capital Markets, had been bullish on the potential for \u201cagentic use of the internet and web applications to drive CDN traffic higher.\u201d That statement demonstrates no understanding of delivery technology, the scale of traffic requests, and how content is delivered. Agentic traffic refers to traffic generated by autonomous AI agents. AI agents are not watching videos from streaming services or downloading large software files, which account for the largest majority of the bit volume for a CDN vendor. Anything an AI agent does, such as requesting information from a website, accounts for a very small volume of data per request.<\/p>\n

As of late 2024\u20132025, the average home page size is approximately 2.1 MB, according to HTTP Archive. A 30-minute video streamed at 6 Mbps averages 2.7 GB of data delivered. The video delivers 1,200 times as many bits as a webpage, or 2,400 times more for a 60-second video.<\/p>\n

Before earnings, year-to-date, Fastly\u2019s stock was up 210%, and it rallied 19% ahead of earnings. Even with the stock down 40% as of 2:35pm ET, it\u2019s still up 212% in the past year. While Fastly raised its full-year 2026 revenue guidance to $710-$720 million, the midpoint was below Wall Street\u2019s $716 million estimate. That, plus Fastly\u2019s Q2 revenue guidance of $170-176M, which would be mostly flat from Q1, would be a realistic explanation for the stock\u2019s decline.<\/p>\n

Anyone on Wall Street expecting an acceleration in bit delivery within the CDN product bucket clearly doesn\u2019t understand the market conditions, pricing, contract terms, commitments, or size of files delivered. And yet, so many public data points exist, many from the CDNs themselves, that Wall Street misses.<\/p>\n

Disclaimer: I have never bought, sold or traded shares in any public CDN vendor, nor do I own any shares in any private CDN vendor.<\/p>\n

Related<\/em><\/h3>\n<\/p><\/div>\n


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Fastly\u2019s stock was down 40% on Thursday, May 7th, one day after its Q1 earnings report, with Piper Sandler saying, \u201cThe disappointment was in the core delivery business that saw lower quarter-over-quarter volumes than most were expecting, as pricing remained stable.\u201d Who\u2019s most, and why were they expecting something different? If you talk to customers, […]<\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1993,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-9396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-live-session"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/paknews.centers.pk\/ur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/paknews.centers.pk\/ur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/paknews.centers.pk\/ur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paknews.centers.pk\/ur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paknews.centers.pk\/ur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=9396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/paknews.centers.pk\/ur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9396\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paknews.centers.pk\/ur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1993"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/paknews.centers.pk\/ur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=9396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paknews.centers.pk\/ur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=9396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/paknews.centers.pk\/ur\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=9396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}