The AMP effort is building both momentum and speed. There has been significant progress not only since the Developer Preview in early October, but even since the last update a couple of weeks ago. Let’s take a look:
Google will begin sending traffic to AMP pages in Google Search as early as late February, 2016. Twitter will begin to experiment with linking to AMP content provided by publishers early in 2016. Pinterest, currently testing publisher AMP pages in their iOS and Android apps, found that AMP pages load four times faster and use eight times less data than traditional mobile-optimized pages. In addition, today we’re announcing that leading messaging apps LINE, Viber, and Tango will link to AMP content in early 2016 as well.
CMS and analytics providers are critical players in the AMP ecosystem and have stepped up with fantastic support for the initiative. WordPress will support all publishers that wish to enable AMP pages beginning in January. From the world of analytics, comScore, Chartbeat, Google Analytics, and Parse.ly will have AMP support in their tools by late February.
We also want to update you on four key areas of the AMP Project: Advertising, Analytics, Subscriptions, and Content Format Innovation.
- Advertising: The initial roadmap for ads includes faster ads, ads that can resize, and support for viewability; as well as integration with certain data management providers, and sponsored content providers. While these new capabilities are being implemented in AMP, publishers and ad tech partners are working in parallel to implement and test them. Buyers have also been engaged: Annalect (Omnicom Media Group) is currently reviewing the project and excited about what AMP is trying to accomplish for users and advertising. Advertising companies that have expressed their intention to support AMP include: Outbrain, AOL, Taboola, OpenX, DoubleClick, AdSense, Pubmatic, Integral Ad Science, Moat, Smart AdServer, Krux, Polar, Nativo and Teads.tv.
- Analytics: The design for a richer analytics framework was posted to Github in early November for feedback. Implementation is in progress, with the initial functionality landing in December and more coming in the subsequent weeks. Preliminary end-to-end testing for publishers and analytics vendors is expected to start in late December, with full testing happening in mid to late January. In addition to the analytics partners mentioned above, Nielsen, Adobe Analytics, and ClickTale have expressed their intention to support AMP in 2016.
- Subscriptions: The design draft for metered paywall and subscription access is being reviewed with several publishers. The proposed solution covers metering and access for subscribers. Engineering is working out technical details on the spec and on prototyping the solution.
- Content Format Innovation: New components and enhancements to existing ones continue to be designed and added to AMP. Highlights include amp-iframe, which now has resizing capability, and amp-click-to-play to enable a rich experience within an iframe once a user interaction has occurred. We now have templates to dynamically fetch fresh content, inspired by the need to support onward journey experiences. What’s more, several technology partners have contributed new code to AMP: Brightcove has submitted the amp-brightcove component to enable a Brightcove Video Cloud or Perform player to be displayed and Vine has built an amp-vine component to display a Vine embed. Several more initial format components have been prioritized and are being tracked on Github.
Many more new publishers have come on board to express their intention to support AMP next year. These include Network18, NDTV, and DNA India in India; Tempo and Kompass in Indonesia; Chosun, Joongang, Maekyung, Yonhap, YTN, Newstapa, and Slow News in South Korea; Inquirer in the Philippines; Televisa and Grupo Expansión in Mexico; Fox News in the US; and LINE, Nikkan Sports, CINEMATODAY, and IID, Inc. in Japan. LinkedIn intends to support AMP in early 2016 by serving faster-AMP alternatives to its published content when available.
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. 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. And in the meantime, we encourage you to create your first AMP page.
Posted by Richard Gingras, Head of News, Google