Google's AMP support now available for more than 1bn people in Asia Pacific

Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), an open source initiative that aims to provide mobile-optimised content, will now be available for 1 billion people in Asia Pacific region.

The tech giant has partnered with Yahoo Japan, Baidu, and Sogou which collectively accounts for 90 percent of the search market in China. The announcement was made by Google Vice President of Engineering David Besbris at Google’s first AMP developer conference in New York.

In a blog post, Besbris wrote, “The addition of these key distribution platforms represents a major step for the open source project which launched in October 2015 alongside a handful of publishers and technology companies all united by a common cause: make the mobile web work better for everyone.”

AMP, launched in 2015, is a Google-led open framework for creating articles and other web pages that load more quickly.

The latest partnerships are expected to “tremendously increase the reach of where AMP pages can go” and help fulfil the promise that publishers can build one file that works well on every distribution platform.

Apart from Yahoo Japan, Baidu and Sogou, some other companies have also partnered with the Google such as Bing, Pinterest and LinkedIn. Besbris also noted that on LinkedIn, "AMP articles see a 10 percent increase in time spent reading compared to non-AMP articles."

Tumblr is also expected to soon roll out AMP support to all Tumblr blogs.