Google AMP Is Taking Over Mobile Web?

The way we reach information today has been transformed from newspaper to smartphones or tablets. Though people are spending an enormous amount of time with mobile phones, bad web experience can spoil the efforts. Hence to solve the complaints of publishers and advertisers, Google announced that their Accelerated Mobile Pages project will be launched by the end of February'16. Google AMP aims to dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web.

AMP empowers content publishers to streamline content templates with an open-source structure named AMP HTML. It is meant to analyze cumbersome HTML, CSS, and JavaScript elements, resulting in a unembellished page that only includes the most vital content.

Initially, i.e. in September'15, this project was prepared by for Facebook’s Instant Articles and Apple News. But now, Google is welcoming other platforms; Twitter and LinkedIn have signed on, among others.

For Facebook and Apple, mobile publishing is only slightly connected to their core business but for Google, it’s critically connected. AMP is a central part of Google’s purpose to mop up the mobile Web and boost search revenue on mobile.

According to Google, websites that play a part in this structure benefit from speed gains since the content templates share common components, leading to a 15 to 85% performance improvement. “An AMP page is 4 times electric and 10 times thinner data. It’s instant. And that’s powerful element of Google AMP. This is, by far, the most active open source project we’ve ever been involved in.” said Richard Gingras, Google’s senior director of news and the project’s chief.

“If you’re a publisher and you’re not thinking AMP, you’re not thinking about your search business,” said Cory Haik, CSO for online publication Mic, which put out its own open source module for publishers using AMP. “Speed matters, clearly AMP is an effective means of getting a very good speed result,” said Gingras, although he would not say if AMP tags triggered better search result placement.

The company is working intimately with its partners to solve the issue of ad-blocking, said Jason Fairchild, CRO of OpenX, an AMP ad-tech partner. Publishers can run ads within AMP as they normally do, but with only a select few ad-buying tools, including Google’s massive ones. Several ad industry sources said this restriction will likely push more publishers to turn to Google to run ads inside AMP.