Dive Brief:

• Google on Wednesday officially announced its open-source Accelerated Mobile Pages project (AMP), on which it has been working with Twitter.
• The concept is similar to Facebook’s Instant Articles and Snapchat’s Discover portal, though the delivery is different – the articles aren’t hosted on a new service, but served to mobile users from web content already cached by Google.
• Benefits for publishers include engagement on Google search, the ability to push viewers to their websites, and additional views and revenue from ads existing on the cached content served by AMP.

Dive Insight:

Announcing the project, Google's head of news and social products Richard Gingras said, "The web today, particularly in the mobile environment, is not really fully satisfying users' expectations. And advertising, which obviously is the lifeblood of many institutions creating content on the Web, often provides great, compelling advertising experiences but also presents experiences that are a bit more annoying than they are helpful."

Accelerated Mobile Pages will work by plugging a piece of Google code into publishers' websites that will speed mobile load times. Google claims this process cut down load time between 15% and 85% percent in initial tests. Twitter has been working with Google on the project from the early stages and its users clicking on mobile links will also see the improved load time for mobile webpages.

The tool is open source and technically unbranded so anyone can use it. AMP will also allow publishers complete control over how visitors view their content, as well as give them an opportunity to drive that traffic back to their website from the cached mobile article.