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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: 0, Disagree) by Anonymous Coward on Saturday September 08 2018, @05:12PM (2 children)
Oh? Do tell, what technical solution are you proposing to let both publishers and advertisers keep making money that doesn't involve server side telemetries owned and operated by an invested third party like google? There will always be third party ad servers and the only way to keep users from disabling javascript or avoid the content altogether is by keeping the code to a minimum. And the best way to do that was to XHR scripts to google's own ad serving cloud.
We already had uMatrix and uBlock around for years. Did publishers stop adding more javascript or did it cause the exact opposite and made them implement their own DRM schemes that blocked people who weren't enabling javascript? Google slowing down connection by 8s is nothing. They could have blocked the content. They could have blacklisted your IP for a few minutes thus blocking you and everyone on your network from google searches (they do that if you fail their captcha tests too many times)...
So unless you have a viable alternative solution, go karma whore elsewhere.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Pino P on Monday September 10 2018, @02:40AM (1 child)
Ads that aren't third party. Web publishers acting like print publishers, with a self service UI for an advertiser to upload "creative" (JPEG or PNG images to display) in standard IAB ad unit sizes and buy ad space in particular sections, so that a campaign goes live as soon as the publisher's standards and practices department approves the creative. This is what Daring Fireball [daringfireball.net] and Read the Docs [readthedocs.io] do. But I don't see it catching on more widely because ad impressions based on tracking a viewer's interests across sites reportedly have three times the payout (PDF) [politico.com] of impressions that are not.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Monday September 10 2018, @05:59PM
So to get first party ads to payoff, we need >66% ad-blocker adoption rates...
Reports peg ad blocker usage from 22-40% so there's a ways to get before it breaks even still. (Self reported...)