Google have rolled out their Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and are now live in the search result pages for most users. This was supposed to go live tomorrow on the 24th as reported by AdAge, however they started appearing in the search results today.
These pages are only news pages only at the moment and displayed in the news stories section as well as the news carousel.
Below is an example of the search query “David Cameron”. The articles are clearly labelled as AMP with a thunderbolt icon. These pages load almost instantaneously, much faster than the normal news pages. According to Google, these pages load 85% faster than normal pages.
One downside from a publisher’s point of view is if you swipe right intentionally or accidentally you are taken to the next publisher’s article. Surely as a publisher you wouldn’t want it to be this easy to be able to end up on a competitor website, losing potential ad revenue.
Last October Google announced their Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) initiative, a project to speed up the mobile web. The idea was to create a new open source framework that would load images and content instantaneously. The pages are streamlined to load as little excess code and resource as necessary.
A number of publishers and websites have worked with Google to implement the mark up in time for the launch.Twitter, Pinterest, WordPress.com, Chartbeat, Parse.ly, Adobe Analytics and LinkedIn are among some of the first group of technology partners planning to integrate AMP HTML pages.
There was some initial reservation in regards to advertising, however this has also been addressed. More than 20 ad tech providers have joined the initiative including AdSense, DoubelClick and OpenX.
It will be interesting to see the impact of this initiative for the publisher, from the readers point of view it makes sense and provides a better experience.
