If you simply drop the favicon.ico file in wwwroot for the site for now, this icon will be displayed for all sites in this instance. Since the serving media content goes through the MediaRequestHandler , as you indicated, this handler works in context on this managed IIS site and therefore will show the root favicon.ico . The way to fix this for content pages is to link to the icon using a meta tag in your specific layout, but I don't think you can get around this for multimedia elements.