t-online - Innovation and Technology

As part of a comprehensive product relaunch, the desktop and mobile websites of t-online received a completely new design in May 2022 and were given a complete technological overhaul. The partnership between Ströer and Amazon Web Services (AWS) played a key role in this process of bringing the "dinosaur" of the German-language internet into the modern age.

In this interview, Sven Scheffler, Chief Operations Officer of the Ströer Content Group, provides insights into the successful transformation process of t-online.

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Sven, last year t-online got a completely new design as well as new and faster technology. Why did you decide to do this?

Sven: When Ströer took over t-online from Telekom in 2015, it was a general interest portal that had fallen out of time. We declared our goal to turn t-online into Germany's leading news and media brand. It was always clear that this would not be a sprint but a marathon. The first step was the establishment of a new editorial office in the capital, which has been setting new journalistic standards ever since. Under the leadership of editor-in-chief Florian Harms, this has been very successful in recent years. t-online has clearly gained in relevance, is now even widely quoted internationally and has long been on the same level as other journalistic news brands.

The next step was to transform the somewhat dusty site into a platform fit for the future. As part of a comprehensive product relaunch, we reinvented t-online on all channels. We also renewed the entire 25-year-old tech infrastructure and made it future-proof. One must not forget: t-online is one of the oldest websites in Germany. The technical infrastructure was becoming outdated and we urgently needed to invest in operational reliability and scalability. 

With the relaunch, t-online also completed its cloud transformation: both the new content management system and the new website as well as the search are hosted in the cloud.

Who is t-online working with for this?

Sven: We decided to cooperate with Amazon Web Services (AWS) for cloud services in order to achieve faster modernisation cycles and higher scalability. AWS is one of the largest and most established providers on the market and the applications we use have the highest maturity level there. An important decision was which services to migrate to the cloud and which to develop from scratch. In parallel, we developed a new, modern CMS - a huge milestone, especially in terms of speed. Our editors can now create content much faster and we as tech developers can implement ideas and product developments for users, editors and advertisers much faster. The loading speed of the site has also improved. We are also looking at how artificial intelligence (AI) can change portals like t-online. With the new infrastructure, we can implement AI projects much more easily.

What role did sustainability and security play in the decision to work with AWS?

Sven: AWS has a high sustainability standard and invests a lot of resources to operate its data centres sustainably. For example, AWS already relies a lot on green power and has set itself the goal of using only renewable energy for its data centres by 2025. An important factor for us is that, thanks to cloud technology, we only use as much computing capacity as we actually need.

When it comes to security, AWS is a leader. There is a whole range of security products, including the security hub, which automatically performs security checks, AI-based threat detection and automated resource monitoring. Especially in the case of DDoS attacks, the cloud helps to buffer them with massively scalable computing power so that t-online doesn't go down to its knees.

How are you positioned technologically on the marketing side, i.e. what does your adtech stack look like?

Sven: We benefit from the synergies of the Ströer Group. With Ströer.Core, we have access to a technology core "Made in Germany". Ströer.Core contains a supply-side platform, the demand-side platform and some functionalities of an ad server. Header bidding based on the very successful Yieldlove model is implemented there and Seeding Alliance also handles the automated sale of native ads for t-online. In-app and holistic video marketing also run via Ströer.Core. We have also extended our partnership with Taboola until 2028.

Of course, we also used the relaunch and the associated switch to a new system to optimise the marketing set-up. The new setup is not only better from a technical point of view. The overall system is so flexible that we can scale at any time and react in all directions. Speed also plays an outstanding role. Not only have we made our pages much faster, but we are also working on systematically speeding up ad delivery.

We now have all over the right tools to develop IT solutions quickly and go live.

Thank you for the interview!