The disappointing state of mobile user experience was again cast into the limelight last week by a report from The New York Times showing just how much online ads increase the time it takes to load mobile content.
On average, across 50 big-name news sites, the Times found ad-related scripts and server requests added 5.7 seconds to page load times. The worst offender, The Boston Globe, added more than 30 seconds with ads, which the Times estimated was worth around $0.32 in user data.
Waiting an excessive amount of time for content to load is one of the biggest complaints users have with publishers and advertisers on mobile. Publishers are scrambling to find ways to make their content load faster without sacrificing ad revenue. Google‘s latest initiative aims to help them do that.
Its new Accelerated Mobile Pages (or AMP — get it?) is a light-weight, open source HTML architecture optimized to reduce mobile loading times. Google says any mobile publisher that opts to use AMP will see drastically improved loading times; its demo video shows rich media content from The Guardian and The Washington Post loading almost instantly.
“Publishers around the world use the mobile web to reach [their] readers, but the experience can often leave a lot to be desired,” Google vice-president of engineering, search David Besbris wrote in a blog post Wednesday announcing AMP. “Every time a webpage takes too long to load, they lose a reader — and the opportunity to earn revenue through advertising or subscriptions.”
Besbris said Google has already signed on 30 publishers to test AMP pages, including the BBC, BuzzFeed, Conde Nast, The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. Technology and content distribution partners Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, WordPress, Chartbeat and Adobe Analytics have also committed to integrating AMP with their platforms.
Although AMP appears to be Google’s answer to Facebook’s Instant Articles (which launched earlier this year with the promise of reducing load times on articles posted to the social service), Google said that with AMP, publishers will retain complete control of their content and data and will be free to continue hosting their own content. One of the concerns that arose over Instant Articles was that publishers would have to host their content with Facebook, which some feared would sacrifice their autonomy.
By contrast, the AMP framework is not template-based and can be wrapped around existing web content, with the flexibility for publishers to maintain a familiar user experience. Access to AMP is free, and publishers won’t be obligated to use Google’s ad server or ad inventory management platform along with it. Though some of the details still need to be worked out around how tracking and ad serving will work on AMP, Google senior director of news and social products Richard Gingras assured The Wall Street Journal that advertisers will still be able to sell ads using whatever provider they wish.
“This is a project of real ambition,” said Tony Danker, chief strategy officer for The Guardian, in a statement about the launch. “It seeks simultaneously to create a great user experience, to give more autonomy to publishers to deliver that and to develop effective advertising for the mobile web. Achieving these in tandem will be vital to building a more sustainable ecosystem where great journalism can flourish.”
AMP builds on Google’s ongoing project to improve mobile search and web browsing by changing the way publishers and advertisers display content. In April, Google changed its search algorithm to promote pages that are responsively designed for cross-device viewing, and help users avoid the irritation of landing on a desktop-only sites with unreadable print and flash or video content that won’t play properly.
It’s also updated mobile ads in search and on YouTube to make them more context-sensitive for searchers.
Besbris told The Wall Street Journal that pages using AMP will not be ranked differently in Google search than non-AMP pages. However, AMP may affect the site’s experience quality score, which is taken into account in page rankings.
