A traditional CDN focuses on pushing content as close as possible to the requesting user. Typically, they do this by having edge servers at many Points of Presence (POPs) all over the world. The idea is that by caching content and reducing the geographic distance, a traditional CDN will improve speed and reduce the burden on a company’s origin server. There are several problems with the traditional CDN model when it comes to images. A traditional CDN does not know the capabilities of the requesting device. Whether it is an Apple laptop, a Samsung Galaxy S21 smartphone, an Apple iPad Air 2, or a Mortorola G3 smartphone, a traditional CDN will send the same large original image. And since the business model of traditional CDNs are based on a price per gigabyte delivered basis, they have no interest in optimizing the payload. Given their huge infrastructure investment, traditional CDNs need to keep data payloads large to pay for their legacy network costs. An image CDN takes a radically different approach by changing the original static image into dynamic content by optimizing the image in different ways based on context where the image is consumed. This requires intelligent, device-aware edge servers. Because an image CDN reduces image payload and response time so dramatically, particularly for mobile phones it is no longer necessary to build out a CDN with thousands of POPs. Virtual cloud-based edge servers effectively serve the entire globe from only a few dozen locations. This enables an image CDN to deliver quickly to a range of devices at a lower cost.