Dive Brief:

• Google has revealed updates about its open source AMP project – something of a competitor for Facebook’s Instant Articles – and published a blog post with news on four key areas: advertising, analytics, subscriptions and content format innovation.
• The Internet giant also announced Pinterest has been testing AMP in its mobile apps in advance of the February rollout to Google Search.
• The social photo-pinning platform has been seeing four times faster load times and eight times less data usage over traditional mobile-optimized pages. According to Google, 40% of web users will abandon a page that takes longer than three seconds to load.

Dive Insight:

Preparing for February when it will begin sending traffic to Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP), Google took to its AMP Project blog to provide news on four areas key areas and to introduce new features. The company also used the opportunity to tout that it’s now seeing 16,000 new AMP pages daily, and that said that now any publisher can participate in the initiative. 

Google says thousands of publishers, as well as advertisers, have shown interest. At a meeting Google held Wednesday, both Twitter and Pinterest shared how they had been testing AMP for links to third-party sites and content. Marketing Land explained that when Twitter or Pinterest detect AMP content, they can then swap that out for traditional mobile web pages.

For advertising, the news predictably stems around faster ads, resizing for optimization and viewability support, as well as announcing some of the ad tech firms that intend to support AMP: Outbrain, AOL, Taboola, OpenX, DoubleClick, AdSense, Pubmatic, Integral Ad Science, Moat, Smart AdServer, Krux, Polar, Nativo and Teads.tv.

On the analytics side, Google said testing will begin in late December with full testing happening through January.

“The AMP Project is working to make the mobile web experience better for everyone, and it is thrilling to be part of this industry-wide effort to reshape how content is consumed online,” Richard Gingras, head of news at Google, wrote in the blog post. “In the coming weeks, look out for updates on new technology partners, new platforms, and new publishers, as well as the specific launch plans of supporting platforms.”