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Web consultant Barry Adams has written a blog post about the problem with Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) and how to fight against it being shoehorned into the WWW.
Let’s talk about Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP for short. AMP is a Google pet project that purports to be “an open-source initiative aiming to make the web better for all”. While there is a lot of emphasis on the official AMP site about its open source nature, the fact is that over 90% of contributions to this project come from Google employees, and it was initiated by Google. So let’s be real: AMP is a Google project.
Google is also the reason AMP sees any kind of adoption at all. Basically, Google has forced websites – specifically news publishers – to create AMP versions of their articles. For publishers, AMP is not optional; without AMP, a publisher’s articles will be extremely unlikely to appear in the Top Stories carousel on mobile search in Google.
And due to the popularity of mobile search compared to desktop search, visibility in Google’s mobile search results is a must for publishers that want to survive in this era of diminishing revenue and fierce online competition for eyeballs.
If publishers had a choice, they’d ignore AMP entirely. It already takes a lot of resources to keep a news site running smoothly and performing well. AMP adds the extra burden of creating separate AMP versions of articles, and keeping these articles compliant with the ever-evolving standard.
So AMP is being kept alive artificially. AMP survives not because of its merits as a project, but because Google forces websites to either adopt AMP or forego large amounts of potential traffic.
And Google is not satisfied with that. No, Google wants more from AMP. A lot more.
AMP is also purported to throw in an 8-second delay to punish those that do not toe the line.
Earlier on SN:
Google Attempting to Standardize Features of Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) (2018)
Kill Google AMP Before It Kills the Web (2017)
(Score: 4, Insightful) by VLM on Saturday September 08 2018, @03:09PM (1 child)
Call a spade a spade, its clickbait political propaganda.
Not our editor or comments or story; I'm talking about the paid political operatives and national governments spreading propaganda masquerading as "news".
The local legacy newspaper propaganda outlet is pushing:
Headline of a corporate press release about a new industrial (not consumer level) product, theoretically more jobs, well, in China, anyway, but the shell of the company is still on shore... for now... A local judge tongue lashing the prosecutors office WRT laziness, its not his fault (the judge) that trials are late. A local real estate developer puff piece. Two suburban high schools had a football game, total enrollment at both is about 3K and around a tenth of that showed up at the game (this ain't Texas, LOL). One black guy was killed and two black guys wounded in the usual overnight shootings in the black neighborhoods, I think they just rerun the story and roll 1D4 for new numbers each day. Some bizarre inside baseball "scandal" about some local oversight committee not oversighting a department at all. A corporate owned pro sport team where the average viewer age is retired boomer is having some kind of uninteresting personnel problem (literally, "inside baseball"). Scrolly scrolly scrolly, WTF haven't seen this many links on a web page since 1994 ... scrolly scrolly scrolly ... Five propaganda articles all fairly content free suffering from intense severe Trump Derangement Syndrome, your standard 1984-style two minutes hate, OK thats almost normal now, but five in this issue? Win a weekend getaway for two, to a city with a murder rate five times our cities rate, uh no thanks. A local private uni with about 2K students is having challenges. Two politicians are shit talking about various opinions, in a total shocker we declare the lefty to be honest and the RINO to be a liar. A 1970s pop star is coming to a small venue in a couple months. Things to watch for and predict about a college football game this weekend for two schools that are hundreds of miles away (who gives a F?). A school district 300 miles away made a trivial policy change that doesn't really matter; will our local districts copy them and why? X reasons why this season is great. A puff piece on recent fashion trends for Rosh Hashanah menus (I kid you not, too weird to make this shit up)
The common thread with all the stories is they're either formulaic and meaningless, or hyper predictable propaganda, or only hold interest for maybe a couple thousand folks at most out of the millions in this greater metro area. Its sort of like a random twitter feed, but more boring and less useful.
Lets say google kills this industry; have we lost anything?
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @10:08PM
Lets say google kills this industry; have we lost anything?
They want to make it easy to sell you things. On your phone. It took a bit of doing but I think I finally got the notifications under control. Have to sit down and do the same to my wifes phone. That is fairly new. Basically they want to make it easy to scrape then be small when they bounce you off their servers.
As for what is real news. You are spot on. I would add, we asking these exact same questions in 1980 when CNN first popped up. Apparently a bunch of pundits screaming at each other over something none of us can control in 20 different ways.
It gets even worse when you dig into *how* these places are getting the news. AP/Reuters/CNNNetwork/FoxNetwork. These news services are basically how all of these guys get the garbage they serve us.
Once I learned companies and countries submitted news pieces in whole to stations to read aloud I realized our news was less than honest. It was very manufactured. Not necessarily for our own good.