Google: All About Accelerated Mobile Pages

We live in a world driven by information. Perhaps then, it is natural for many of us to start their day by reading headlines over the web. With visitors are already impatient and burdened due to daily stress, no media publisher wants a slow mobile website that will drive the visitors away; the domino effect threatens their ad revenues!

Google has launched a new mobile-web publishing service called Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP). It partners with multiple media outlets to bring out their content on mobile-web.

Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages program will load pages in instants, not seconds

Origin of the Problem

Media publishers can deliver content in three major forms: desktop website, mobile website, and their own native apps.

Each of these account for certain share of traffic for each individual publisher.Desktop consumption is fairly less in comparison to the other two. Moreover on desktop, wired or home Wi-Fi networks don’t pose a big speed issue. While native apps are in control of publishers, mobile web is an altogether different animal.

The What of AMP

The problem occurs when mobile websites slow down - especially when the visitors move into low network areas. Accelerated Mobile Pages enables stories to load several times faster – less than a second in most cases; It also enables display of ads in a way that doesn’t break the user experience.

Google and publishers say the new format will lend itself to a more consumer-friendly ad experience where ads load instantly. By definition, “the project relies on AMP HTML, a new open framework built entirely out of existing technologies, which allows websites to build light-weight webpages.”

Also, consistent to Google’s policy on free web (which is reflected in its ban of ad blockers on the Play Store market), AMP allows ad blockers.

The open source nature of AMP will facilitate quicker adoption

How will AMP Work

AMP technology is free and open-source, meaning any website publisher can use it and tinker with the software.Google has, in fact, gone a step further and opened the technical specification on GitHub.

To expand the reach of AMP, Google has partnered with social giants like Twitter, Pinterest, WordPress.com, and LinkedIn, along with 30 publishers including Les Echos, BBC, the Financial Times, and the Wall Street Journal. AMP is also expected to be integrated into Google News very soon.

AMP will enable publishers to focus purely on content and user experience through varied plug-ins and ad analytics, while subordinating the task of high performance onto AMP HTML code.

AMP’s focus will not just be performance, as Google has made it clear that it ultimately aims to support a comprehensive range of ad formats, ad networks and technologies. The emphasis in developing these functionalities will be to prevent that ad formats from getting so aggressive that they overwhelm and distract the user from the actual content to be read. These features are expected to be developed over the coming months in collaboration with publishers.

Ubiquitous access across different devices and platforms is the key to ensure free flow of information across the globe. An underlying layer of AMP focuses on a new approach to caching that enables efficient distribution to Google’s high performance global cache. Publishers are not only not bound to using this global cache, Google plans to open this cache free of cost to publishers.

AMP vs. GoogleWebLight?

As you can probably imagine, it is quite natural for users to start comparing it with Google WebLight, a similar serviced launched at Google IO 2015 that trims down css and script files of the page to make them load at 4X faster speeds.

Consequently, Google’s WebLight also reduces the data usage in as much as 80%. It may not sound an attractive proposition, as it takes away most of the styling of the web page. An important thing that distinguishes WebLight from AMP is their respective purpose.

The WebLight service renders a lighter, cached version of the page and is meant for developing countries where many users still don’t have the luxury of high-speed 3G connections. At present, it operates only in India, China and Brazil. On the contrary, AMP has a much broader scope.

AMP’s central purpose will be to enable mobile websites to build light-weight web pages via an open-sourced, content-intensive and ubiquitously delivered platform. Unlike WebLight, AMP will NOT be restricted to only certain countries.

It will be interesting to see whether Google decides to continue or suspend the WebLight feature post the launch of AMP.

Competing Services from Apple News and Facebook’s Instant Articles

With the public release of the code on GitHub, Google’s AMP program is certainly more publisher-friendly than Apple’s News app and Facebook’s Instant Articles feature. 

With the announcement of AMP, Google has leapfrogged over Apple and Facebook. While IA from Facebook allows users to read articles within the native app, Apple’s News app is an aggregator itself. In both cases, publishers are relinquishing certain control to the app.

These features are more tightly integrated with their native apps. An AMP rendered page, however, can be implemented by any website (including your own personal blog).

Google has released the AMP HTML source code on GitHub thus enabling easier and quicker of the service

Final Thoughts

Google has acted like a perfect opportunistic. AMP has potential for wide scale adoption and owning to its open source nature, it will do so with will full support from publishers.

To put it bluntly, Google sensed an opportunity, took it with both hands and ran with it!

In fact, I would go on to say that while the cats were fighting over the cake, the monkey has taken away the cake!

What are your thoughts on Google's AMP vs. Apple News vs. Facebook's Instant Articles?