I imagine if they stripped off all the stuff from their own sites that doesn't show up on AMP the speed would basically be the same, and they wouldn't be under Google's thumb.
No massive header with lots of images of other stories, no master folder with lots of images of other stories, no giant sidebar with lots of images of other stories… get rid of all of them. All of a sudden your page is really fast and doesn't take 45s to load.
Remember what the web was like on dial-up? Design pages for that but with large images. Text goes a LONG way for navigation and discovery of other stories. You don't need ridiculous big images.
Do something really simple. Make a page with content that looks exactly like the AMP page. AB test that against the AMP page. I'd be willing to bet they basically perform the same, modulo any benefit Google gives you for being part of their lock-in.
Text articles with pictures do not require the complexity of googles infrastructure and systems to be fast and lite.
We had to pause that project and drop it all to go work on AMP...
(so you could fairly say I'm a bit bitter about that)
BTW Hey Mike miss you!
edit: HN is another great example, of course :)
I don't like being lied to.
They're not doing it because it's faster, they're doing it because they want the rank boost.
So I think I should just say that. "We did it to get higher rankings because Google prioritizes it." Don't lie and say it was to get things to be faster, you could've done that on your own.
Not willing to say that? Then don't talk about speed. Because you had control over that.
There is little to no financial incentive for companies to swim against the current, and large financial incentive to come aboard and join the ranks of other AMP-supported sites.
The cracks in the system are beginning to show.
Well...of course. Limitations are empowering in their own way. HTML grew, and grew, and grew to the point that soon middle managers are demanding the most abusive tactics in a desperate tragedy of the commons. Users -- tired of pop-overs and subscription boxes and notification demands and location monitoring and janky scrolling and slow loading -- start to prefer silos like Facebook instant articles or Apple news. AMP comes along and says "we'll limit these to the minimum to elegantly provide text content and put an icon to let you know" and users love it.
Could the site optimize themselves? Of course but they won't.
Every time AMP comes up I remark that we really need a new HTMLite specification, and must demand the same promotion/iconography, or optionally allowing users to turn their browser to HTMLite mode where it will only accept validated HTMLite content. All to achieve the same user-benefits without the central control. Instead everyone just pretends that we all just need to behave as developers and it isn't needed.
> AMP’s new speed gains in Google Search are due to several key optimizations that we made to the Google AMP Cache, such as server-side rendering of AMP components, and reducing bandwidth usage from images by 50% without affecting the perceived quality. We also used a compression algorithm called Brotli that Google launched a couple years ago, resulting in a reduced document size by an additional 10% in supported browsers.
So, no. Just stripping down the page would not make pages load as quickly as AMP. Then, there's also the fact that you get Google's CDN for free.
[0] https://www.ampproject.org/latest/blog/turbocharging-amp/
As much as HN loves to bicker about Amp, in this case it was clearly a net positive.
Meanwhile, "monetization benefits are less decisive and pending further analysis of our current implementation."
Publishers find a number of benefits to AMP -- revealed frankly in the article -- but the only reason they use it in the first place is because Google is where a lot of those eyeballs originate anyway. If Some Obscure Search Engine with ~1% marketshare reworked their mobile page to prioritize pages that adhere to some criteria of limitations, used an iframe to frame the content so that it loads inside their page, and threw in a free CDN to sweeten the deal, who'd retool their publishing infrastructure -- as excellently detailed in this post -- to publish in this format?
AMP enables an alliance of convenience between one of the top sources of traffic (Google), and the authors of long-form textual content reliant on advertising revenue. To the AMP team's credit, it does so by aligning closer than its competitors to how the web actually works, despite the Google-Search-on-Mobile page then acting as a captive newsreader.
Most user criticism of AMP is focused on Google-Search-on-Mobile stealth-morphing into a captive newsreader, while most publisher criticism of AMP is from sites outside of its target market trying out the tech and alarmed at the lack of traffic reaching their server, forgetting that offloading traffic at high volumes is a good thing. AMP isn't for people who are upset that Google is stealing your content; it's for publishers who want Google to expose their content to wide audience and hope to generate revenue through means that correlate to that reach.
> AMP enables an alliance of convenience between ... Google ... and the authors ...
The third party in that alliance is the end user who was a decent mobile browsing experience. As one, I absolutely love AMP. It guarantees that the page I am about to click on is not going to be horrible. So much so that these days, I actively seek out pages with AMP icon in my search results.
And what freedoms will be lost when we are all required to run AMP website?
>> in this case it was clearly a net positive
Not so fast. When I was there, the earlier experiment was that its was a "mixed" success. This post also suggests strongly to me that that hasn't changed too much ("Monetization benefits are less decisive and pending further analysis").
For many publishers it comes down to they cant get slightly more traffic with AMP (because of the AMP carousel in Search results) at a lower CPM which is a positive. However, as more publishers come on board that gets tricky all over again and risk of it becoming another race to the bottom of lower CPMs.
So ranking #2 in search results on average correlated with an increase in click through rate. Oh, btw, just happens that you gotta use AMP to get the SERP gain.
And, like many engineering blogs about employing Google products, seems like it might've been suggested by a Google marketing team.
There's a lot of conspiracy theories and misunderstanding about how AMP works in the community. AMP is by no means perfect, but its dangers are greatly exaggerated. If you don't trust Google's CDN, no one is forcing you to use Google. The benefits for non-tech users (e.g. my cousin in a 3rd world country with a 2G connection) are there and are clear.
Then Google will make their next move.
This is exactly how Froogle/Google product search went.
Performance: yes.
Consistency: NO. It looks like one of those annoying download-my-app bars, but it isn't, it's a back button. As if I didn't already have one of those.
Experience: NO. It sucks up space on my mobile device, and I can't get rid of it.
User feedback: can't wait for iOS 11 and Safari's anti-AMP. Unfortunately, I don't see anywhere I can give user feedback.
The reasoning behind consistency and experience which we talk about in the post are mainly with regards the AMP content itself. Valid AMP content (passing the AMP validator) from different publishers behaves very similar to each other. Meaning you won't have any surprises as the content loads, and it will load very quickly. The experience benefits revolve around the AMP Runtime loading advertisement and embeds on-demand without blocking the main content itself from displaying properly or causing it to re-layout as the user starts reading.
But the other points, correct me if I'm wrong, but it basically sounds like you are saying "AMP forces our content across publishers to be consistent, and it has a structure that makes sure advertisements don't block page loading." As a web publisher, though, surely Conde Nast has control over the layout of its content. And as a web publisher, it is part of Conde Nast's job to make sure the content loads quickly and that the ads do not block page loading. At the risk of sounding aggressive, your reasons sound like "AMP enables us to outsource all the hard parts of our job."
As to the experience benefits are ads loading more smoothly, as a user, is an experience benefit. Technically. Except that, as a user, ads substantially decrease my experience. I get that Conde Nast exists to make money, that I don't want to pay money for the privilege, and that we are fundamentally at odds here. But attempting to sell faster loading of ads to me in the guise of improving my user experience feels somewhat disingenuous.
What are you referring to? Safari adds a feature requested by Google that if you share an AMP page it shares the canonical URL and not the AMP url. Is that the "anti-AMP"?
The screeds and anger about AMP on here absolute baffle me.
People are angry because Google exists on the open web, unlike Facebook which is pretty much self-contained, and they're big enough that they'll probably succeed.
AMP should have been a separate link like cached (maybe have the icon link to it?)
What sucks up space that you can't get rid of? It's just a web page, same as any other page.
It's a way for major publishers to get a dominant/favored position and crowd out "fake news" and it's a way for google to get a monopolistic publishing platform.
So it is a "win-win" for google and some of the major publishing industry. It is a lose-lose for everyone else.
Publishing/media has been waging a war against social media and decentralized internet. They have to losing audience due to the fractured nature of the internet. And they are trying to get back their "captive audience".
Whether it works or not, we'll see.
But its not a competition.
Interesting time for small-scale and custom search sites ahead.
How dare are you, Google? Open and decentralized world wide web is the thing that allowed you to exist in the first place.
