Accelerated Mobile Pages in Google Search

Regular readers will know that two recurring themes we covered last year related to the rapid growth of mobile and the increasing use of ad blockers which threaten the revenue streams of both Google and online publishers.

AMP or Accelerated Mobile Pages started as a collaboration between Google and various European news publishers to counter the threat from ad-blocking by radically improving the loading speed of web pages on mobile devices. In addition, Google needed to counter mobile optimisation initiatives by rivals Facebook and Apple (Instant Articles and Apple News).

Google will start including AMP pages in its mobile search results next month and announced on Monday how ads will be handled on AMP pages.  In short, publishers will be able to traffic ads from servers of their choosing, control format and placement, plus view stats. One key point is that all AMP-enabled ad creatives must use HTTPS.

Publishers already testing AMP include Buzzfeed, The Verge, Vox and the Washington Post. The Guardian was one of the initial publishers collaborating with Google and has been generating AMP versions of all its pages since last October.  To see how these look, append /amp to the URL of any webpage and view on a mobile device. For example:

http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2016/jan/28/eu-could-force-google-to-pay-more-uk-tax/amp

Why should you care?

The idea behind AMP is to speed up page load times on mobile and make consuming content on mobile devices more enjoyable — thus providing publishers with better monetization opportunities and better user outcomes for advertisers. So if all goes to plan, AMP should in theory be a win-win for both consumers and publishers.

If you’re a publisher interested in enabling AMP on your site check out the AMP Project site.

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