
The Why and How of Google AMP at Condé Nast - taveras
https://technology.condenast.com/story/the-why-and-how-of-google-amp-at-conde-nast
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MBCook
Why are they crowing about how much faster it is?

I imagine if they stripped off all the stuff from their own sites that doesn't
show up on AMP the speed would basically be the same, and they wouldn't be
under Google's thumb.

No massive header with lots of images of other stories, no master folder with
lots of images of other stories, no giant sidebar with lots of images of other
stories… get rid of all of them. All of a sudden your page is really fast and
doesn't take 45s to load.

Remember what the web was like on dial-up? Design pages for that but with
large images. Text goes a LONG way for navigation and discovery of other
stories. You don't need ridiculous big images.

Do something really simple. Make a page with content that looks exactly like
the AMP page. AB test that against the AMP page. I'd be willing to bet they
basically perform the same, modulo any benefit Google gives you for being part
of their lock-in.

Text articles with pictures do not require the complexity of googles
infrastructure and systems to be fast and lite.

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slackoverflower
You seem to be the missing the whole point of AMP's popularity. The glorious
sliding carousel on Google.com that gives any news website a massive SEO
boost. AMP is the biggest thing to hit the SEO industry in a while. I imagine
most of these media companies could not give a shit about website
optimization, its all about website monetization.

~~~
josho
Which is short sighted on their part. As an AMP early adopter they get a
boost. But, as the industry moves to AMP their SEO boost is lost. So, their
boost is short lived, but Google's edge influence expands and persists over
the long term.

~~~
vwcx
For the most part, digital publishing's remaining lifespan isn't that long.
Not as short-sighted in their remaining life...

~~~
Stefstefstef
care to elaborate?

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yakz
As an end-user, AMP breaks 'back' on my iPhone when I navigate to articles
(including those from Condé Nast) linked to from Google News. I have to scroll
up and use Google's custom back button; using left/right swipe gestures or the
browser's back causes problems. Sometimes it's so bad that when I reload the
page, I get some weird error from Google about how I got there, which is
doubly weird because it's their fault I'm there because they're intentionally
wrapping/breaking standard functionality.

~~~
kllrnohj
Browser back button works fine in chrome on a Android with amp pages fwiw.
Does safari mobile not support the session history management APIs? caniuse
says it does, but it sounds like it doesn't work from what you're saying.

~~~
callalex
And ActiveX worked fine with Internet Explorer on Windows. We look back and
consider that a bad thing for the web, how is this different?

~~~
SquareWheel
Uh, because it's an open standard rather than a proprietary one?

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oneweekwonder
And we are standardizing the benefits activex could give us. So no need for it
anymore ;)

[https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-media/](https://www.w3.org/TR/encrypted-
media/)

edit: I can see it. Next iteration you will need a AMP key to publish your
content and clients will need AMP key to consume content! Browsers that don't
include the key will be excluded from the ampweb.

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prewett
> AMP delivers many benefits in terms of performance, consistency, and
> experience for our mobile users.

Performance: yes.

Consistency: NO. It _looks_ like one of those annoying download-my-app bars,
but it isn't, it's a back button. As if I didn't already have one of those.

Experience: NO. It sucks up space on my mobile device, and I can't get rid of
it.

User feedback: can't wait for iOS 11 and Safari's anti-AMP. Unfortunately, I
don't see anywhere I can give user feedback.

~~~
endorphone
_can 't wait for iOS 11 and Safari's anti-AMP_

What are you referring to? Safari adds a feature _requested by Google_ that if
you share an AMP page it shares the canonical URL and not the AMP url. Is that
the "anti-AMP"?

The screeds and anger about AMP on here absolute baffle me.

~~~
Spivak
Because AMP is Google's attempt to insert themselves in content distribution
and capture an even bigger slice of the pie but with a thin vaneer of 'making
the web faster'.

People are angry because Google exists on the open web, unlike Facebook which
is pretty much self-contained, and they're big enough that they'll probably
succeed.

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SquareWheel
Wow, 36% of traffic seems pretty high. That's a huge chunk of mobile (79%
apparently), with an almost doubled click-through rate.

As much as HN loves to bicker about Amp, in this case it was clearly a net
positive.

~~~
niftich
Sure, they want their content to be read, to be "discoverable by the largest
possible audience".

Meanwhile, "monetization benefits are less decisive and pending further
analysis of our current implementation."

Publishers find a number of benefits to AMP -- revealed frankly in the article
-- but the only reason they use it in the first place is because Google is
where a lot of those eyeballs originate anyway. If Some Obscure Search Engine
with ~1% marketshare reworked their mobile page to prioritize pages that
adhere to some criteria of limitations, used an iframe to frame the content so
that it loads inside their page, and threw in a free CDN to sweeten the deal,
who'd retool their publishing infrastructure -- as excellently detailed in
this post -- to publish in this format?

AMP enables an alliance of convenience between one of the top sources of
traffic (Google), and the authors of long-form textual content reliant on
advertising revenue. To the AMP team's credit, it does so by aligning closer
than its competitors to how the web actually works, despite the Google-Search-
on-Mobile page then acting as a captive newsreader.

Most user criticism of AMP is focused on Google-Search-on-Mobile stealth-
morphing into a captive newsreader, while most publisher criticism of AMP is
from sites outside of its target market trying out the tech and alarmed at the
lack of traffic reaching their server, forgetting that offloading traffic at
high volumes is a good thing. AMP isn't for people who are upset that Google
is stealing your content; it's for publishers who want Google to expose their
content to wide audience and hope to generate revenue through means that
correlate to that reach.

~~~
s17n
I think most of the criticism of AMP is the URLs being messed up, which is
something that will soon be fixed.

~~~
donohoe
No. This will not be fixed.

As long as they insist on using their CDN then this cannot be avoided.

~~~
s17n
It will be fixed client side - Safari is rolling this out in ios 11

~~~
hdhzy
Do you mean the URL shared or displayed in address bar?

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WillPostForFood
The real problem is the "why" which, whether people admit it or not, is
because Google is blackmailing publishers to follow their rules else be
punished in search results. The whole modern web is basically defined by
trying to conform to what Google wants.

~~~
eighthnate
Google worked with some of the major publishers to create AMP just like
facebook did with their instant article. So I wouldn't call it blackmail, more
like a collaboration.

It's a way for major publishers to get a dominant/favored position and crowd
out "fake news" and it's a way for google to get a monopolistic publishing
platform.

So it is a "win-win" for google and some of the major publishing industry. It
is a lose-lose for everyone else.

Publishing/media has been waging a war against social media and decentralized
internet. They have to losing audience due to the fractured nature of the
internet. And they are trying to get back their "captive audience".

Whether it works or not, we'll see.

~~~
WillPostForFood
I guess since I am in the everyone else category, I was focusing more on the
lose-lose than the collaboration with big publishers.

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tannhaeuser
If Google ranks AMP pages higher than regular pages just because they're AMP
pages and hosted on Google property, this simply spells the begin of the end
for Google search as we know it. Who needs that kind of manipulated crap
search? Given the race to the bottom on the web, soon Wikipedia,
StackExchange, Reddit and HN search already covers everything that Google
search does anyway. Oh, and Google, don't let the EU know about this new anti-
competitive behavior of yours.

Interesting time for small-scale and custom search sites ahead.

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donohoe
Completely 100% nit-pick here, but just wanted to say that The New Yorker was
the first Conde property up on AMP (June 14th 2016), and we used WordPress.
Wired and Pitchfork followed after that.

But its not a competition.

~~~
oscrperez
Vanity Fair launched 6/23/2016, the first brand on the Autopilot stack. Sorry
if I didn't mention brands that launched AMP on Wordpress. That would have
probably added confusion to readers outside the company that do not know about
our Wordpress -> Autopilot migrations.

~~~
donohoe
Don't worry. Total nit-pick on my part :)

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garganzol
Google AMP is an attempt to racket the web by stealing content and traffic
while bribing a poor victim with "increased SEO" factor.

How dare are you, Google? Open and decentralized world wide web is the thing
that allowed you to exist in the first place.

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zackbloom
FYI if you're interested in AMP but don't want to be served from a google.com
domain, Cloudflare also has a compatible implementation:
[https://www.cloudflare.com/website-
optimization/accelerated-...](https://www.cloudflare.com/website-
optimization/accelerated-mobile-links/)

~~~
wmf
This doesn't do what you think. Google search always uses the Google AMP
viewer and the Google AMP cache; there's no way to make it use Cloudflare.

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whyagaindavid
Suggestion: use AMP-api to modify all browser requests to load Google CDN AMP
page. Save data.

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javindo
I really wish Google AMP didn't overrule the Chrome android "force enable
pinch to zoom" from an accessibility standpoint.

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taytus
Google AMP has a lot of success stories: [https://www.ampproject.org/case-
studies/](https://www.ampproject.org/case-studies/)

