Dive Brief:
- Google’s open-source answer to Facebook Instant Articles and Snapchat's Discover portal, its Accelerated Mobile Pages project will start serving mobile users with content early next year.
- The program was announced in September and officially launched in October and includes Twitter as a partner.
- According to Google major publishers and ad platforms are preparing content optimized for the AMP technical specs.
Dive Insight:
The otherwise unbranded alternative will serve as a way to provide a better user experience, optimized for speed, for mobile users reading publishers’ content.
The concept is similar to Facebook Instant Articles and Snapchat’s Discover portal without forcing publishers to allow a single platform to control its content. Instead it plugs code into its website that speeds mobile load times giving publishers complete control over the look of the page as well as advertising. Since Instant Articles launched, publishers have jumped to work with the social network given the vast exposure their stories and advertising can have with Facebook.
Since AMP launched in October in preview mode with the New York Times, the Washington Post and News Corp, Google says thousands of publishers, as well as advertisers, have shown interest. According to Venture Beat, Outbrain, AOL, OpenX, DoubleClick and AdSense are working within the AMP framework to create mobile-optimized ads for publishers. Several mobile analytics companies are also working with AMP to help track and analyze performance data.
When announcing Accelerated Mobile Pages in October, 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."
