
Google AMP – A 70% drop in our conversion rate - nate
https://medium.com/the-set-list/google-amp-a-70-drop-in-our-conversion-rate-35fe3cb69c59
======
kodablah
Question: If what makes AMP fast is the restrictions on size, JS, and CSS, and
you know this and want to conform to this, why do you need to use AMP? Why not
just develop your site like this anyways? Is the lightning bolt really that
worth it? I'm not convinced that (any more) Google prioritizes AMP pages
beyond the coincidence that they prioritize faster ones and they are faster.

Also, I wonder if I'm the only one that avoids AMP-based sites out of
principle. I highly doubt it affects your conversions (I'm not really the
easily "convertible" type), but makes one wonder if there can be effective web
tech boycotts.

~~~
notatoad
AMP's innovation isn't a way to make pages fast. AMP is a way to sell other
stakeholders on implementing technologies that make your website fast. All the
stuff AMP does is stuff you could do yourself without the extra request to
amp.js and the extra work to amp-ify your pages.

But imagine you've got an advertising department that wants three different ad
networks, a couple different managers that want to see stats from a couple
different analytics platforms, and and the designer wants to load a font from
fontsquirrel and another one from typekit and another one from google web
fonts, and as a developer who wants to keep the site fast you have to fight
them every single time they want to add something else that slows your site
down. Having the same fight every time, with everybody else saying "oh, it's
just one request. and this one is really critical" it's hard to keep fighting
that fight.

It's a lot easier to say "i can't do that, it doesn't work in AMP". If you can
find a better way to convince large organizations that page load speed is a
valuable metric, and more important that whatever other resource they want to
load today, I'd love to hear it. But from what i've seen, AMP is the only
thing that's had any success in tackling this problem.

~~~
saudioger
This. AMP was a blessing for me honestly. I can now maintain a version of our
new site that isn't bogged down with tracking and flavor-of-the-month JS
feature garbage.

I've been fighting against adding additional tracking forever, but constantly
get railroaded by marketing because "they're the ones that know how to make us
profitable."

Fundamentally I hate what it means for the internet, but I finally have a
little power to say "no we can't do that."

~~~
PaulHoule
It is astonishing how hard it can be to internally sell any kind of web
quality features to management in both for profit and non-profit
organizations.

There is also a real herd effect. Many people will do whatever Matt Cutts
tells them because they think it will be good for their SEO. Yeah right. Some
of the people who are good at SEO either went to work for huge brands or
quasi-competitors of Google (like about.com) that might have some ability to
bring Google to anti-trust court; most of the others switched to paid
advertising once they figured out that Google won't let you win at SEO.

Certainly people who write for Spamium (aka Tedium) are the ones who try herd-
following methods of getting traffic and they tend to be impressed when they
get 100 hits on their blog.

~~~
grivescorbett
Why not provide the bottom / top line impact of page optimization? Your
business’s profitability is the most important thing to your bosses. They do
not care about making the web good, nor should they IMHO. Your job is to show
why both parties’ incentives are actually aligned, not opposed.

~~~
jdietrich
Death by a thousand cuts. Everyone wants to add _just one little resource_ ,
until you end up with 8MB pages with 20 seconds time to interactive. They can
all make a plausible argument for how their _one little resource_ will improve
the bottom line, even considering the performance impact. If you have one
person or one team responsible for performance, they're constantly fighting on
all fronts just to stand still. You need a business-wide performance-oriented
culture, which is very difficult to develop and maintain.

~~~
Drdrdrq
"You can add your just one little resource, but unfortunately the loading time
goes over the limit - you need to identify other resource(s) that can be
removed first."

~~~
jdietrich
Hard performance targets can work, but only if you have full buy-in from
management. If you don't, someone is going to persuade a higher-up to make an
exception _just this one time_ and the whole thing falls apart.

------
rudygalfi
I'm a contributor to AMP and also work on Google Search. We're currently
investigating the issue of the blank page that's mentioned in the article. So
far we've been able to reproduce the issue using the Chrome emulator; however,
we haven't been able to repro on an actual device, either Android or iOS. So
we'll keep digging into this.

The article also mentions the impact on conversion rate. We're interested to
learn more details surrounding this. Blank pages loading for many users would
explain a lower conversion rate but we'd like to figure out if there's any
other possible cause since it doesn't currently seem like most users hit a
blank page in actual usage. I'll get in touch with the article author to see
if there's openness to digging in further.

~~~
Zelphyr
It's great that you guys are receptive to these issues but I can't help but
wonder if, instead of solving this with what is clearly unpopular technology,
we all would have been better off if Google had encouraged better practices?

If, as the article implies, Google will give me the same rankings if I do
things to get the same performance as an AMP page then I would rather do that.

~~~
Vinnl
> if Google had encouraged better practices?

Google has been using indicators like page performance in their ranking
algorithm for quite a while now, so to be fair, it doesn't look like it helped
that much. A single label and clear prioritisation apparently make it a far
easier sell within companies.

~~~
JoshMnem
That might be a more believable explanation of why they did it if they weren't
hijacking the content and hosting it on their own domain with left-right
swipes that take users off of your site. Users don't actually visit your site,
but they visit a restricted shell of it on google.com.

~~~
Vinnl
I'm not a fan of AMP either; just wanted to point out that it's unfair to say
Google should have encouraged better practises when they did just that.

(Not that I'm a fan of Google/any single company having to be that warden, but
I digress.)

------
lawnchair_larry
AMP is a terrible product and an abuse of market position, but the ego behind
it means nobody cares what users think, and it will be touted as a success on
someone's performance review no matter what.

~~~
pohl
It's the most user-hostile thing Google has yet done, and I'm including things
like Google Wave, the death of Google Reader, and things like removing "view
image" from image search results. I loathe getting AMP results. It's always a
struggle to get to the real site.

~~~
tree_of_item
Why do you think Google Wave was user-hostile?

~~~
jpetso
It was meant to replace email, an open standard sporting many interoperable
servers and clients, with something that Google controlled, even though it was
theoretically federated.

After Wave failed, they doubled down on making Gmail into more of a
nonstandard product with reduced interoperability (now requiring Gmail API
instead of standard IMAP) and increasingly, embrace & extend functionality
such as email expiration dates.

~~~
rossjudson
It wasn't theoretically federated. It was actually federated. Interop outside
Google actually happened.

Is something not working with gmail's imap support?

~~~
jpetso
Issues with Gmail IMAP as voiced by other people:

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16951363](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16951363)

[https://www.dvratil.cz/2014/06/improved-gmail-integration-
in...](https://www.dvratil.cz/2014/06/improved-gmail-integration-in-kde-
pim-4-14/)

[https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/gmail/9A5oYELFbu8/7iq...](https://productforums.google.com/d/msg/gmail/9A5oYELFbu8/7iq7WTVrBAAJ)

[https://github.com/mscdex/node-
imap/issues/71](https://github.com/mscdex/node-imap/issues/71)

[https://freron.lighthouseapp.com/projects/58672/tickets/1247...](https://freron.lighthouseapp.com/projects/58672/tickets/1247-gmail-
labels-with-non-ascii-characters-not-working#ticket-1247-7)

Sure you can still access Gmail through IMAP, but if it works differently
enough that using a standard IMAP client feels cumbersome and unfamiliar, is
it really anything else than a vehicle to tell people that they should really
just use the "better" Google product directly?

That said, my original wording of "requiring" the Gmail API was poor and I
should have phrased it more accurately.

~~~
lawnchair_larry
IMAP sucks at not destroying your battery though. That’s why everyone was
using the (also proprietary) activesync provided by exchange.

------
Meai
AMP has a pretty bad user experience that is unrelated to performance: It's
super confusing for me when I am on a news site and the url bar shows a long
unfamiliar string. It actually makes me feel like I need to check if I'm on a
fishing site or I was misdirected or I misclicked.

~~~
mgalka
It's also annoying to have the amp menu bar taking up space at the top. Screen
real estate is scarce and another menu bar at the top is just confusing.

~~~
j79
In Mobile Safari, it's even worse as the bottom navigation bar is present when
the page loads and then stays present.

Since AMP uses an overflow technique to handle content/scrolling, the page
never triggers a scroll event on the body. So not only do you see a toolbar at
the top (which admittedly, slides out when you scroll down), you see the
browser toolbar at the bottom (which persists!)

------
Boulth
> Sometimes I get blank pages.

I got them very frequently (as a user). This coupled with the inability to
turn off AMP finally pushed me to use DDG as the default search engine.

~~~
Sir_Cmpwn
Google actually deliberately makes the page blank with an 8 second animation
to show it again. They remove this animation in JavaScript.

[https://www.ampproject.org/docs/fundamentals/spec/amp-
boiler...](https://www.ampproject.org/docs/fundamentals/spec/amp-boilerplate)

~~~
dasmoth
I guess this is there as an “avoid showing unstyled content at any cost”
thing. But really, WTF?

~~~
kevingadd
"Let's make the web fast and light! Users will love it!" "Also let's
artificially hide content so it feels like it loads slower. Users will love
it!"

The aversion to flashes of unstyled content is so absurd sometimes...

------
acdha
Google restricts access to the search results carousel to AMP. If they did it
in a neutral manner by measuring performance almost all of the criticism would
evaporate.

~~~
kodablah
Eek, I wasn't aware they were still doing that, but I confirmed myself. I
abhor the practice here, and am now committed to not clicking any more AMP
links.

~~~
dmix
I just searched "news" in Google on mobile and 2 links were non-AMP in my
carousel... (ctvnews.ca and thestar.com) but they were heavily optimized in an
AMP-like way.

------
Pxtl
Yeah, the display of AMP pages, even on Android devices, is absurdly user-
hostile. The textless "link" icon to get to the actual content, the loss of
the critical "find in page" command, the loss of screen real-estate when the
browser already has a bar.

It's an odd worst-of-both-worlds implementation where it has made the
compromises needed to display it in a vanilla Chrome browser window, but
doesn't actually appear to be a vanilla Chrome browser window with normal
Chrome features.

And that's not getting into the terrifying power-position it gives google as
the host of your content.

------
larkeith
Personally, I dislike AMP with a vengeance - I refuse to click any AMP search
result or link - so I'm glad to see people quantitatively assessing the
benefits for their site (or lack thereof) and moving away from it. Now if only
we could encourage web developers to still adhere to the better parts of the
protocol, the mobile web might become a better place.

~~~
colinbartlett
I hate AMP so much that I switched to DuckDuckGo on mobile more than a year
ago and have been thrilled. Search results are as good and I haven’t seen an
AMP page since.

~~~
scottwernervt
Did the same along with Firefox mobile with ublock origin which has made
browsing mobile amazing.

------
gizmodo59
I’m at the other end of the spectrum. I don’t have a good internet connection
and it’s painful to wait for a page to load. If I see the AMP icon I will
visit that site than the non AMP site. Oh and I’m in US. If I travel abroad,
it’s much worse. As a consumer, AMP has been phenomenal.

AMP + Safari reader mode = Best browsing experience.

------
deminature
Is there a coordinated campaign going on against AMP? My experience as a user
has been nothing but positive, with pages loading in a small fraction of the
time of normal pages, while I read nothing but negativity about AMP in
developer communities like this one. Am I missing something fundamentally evil
about AMP that's not apparent from the user standpoint? From my limited
perspective, it seems to be the only force trying to counteract an
increasingly bloated and slow web.

~~~
CaptSpify
There's no coordinated campaign that I know of. The negative reaction that I
personally have to AMP is that Google started pushing it as the solution to a
problem that they helped create. It's just an attempt to lock publishers into
Google's ecosystem.

If Google really cared about fixing the root of the problem, they would put
the AMP icon next to sites that are already small and already load fast, and
rank them higher, rather than creating a new platform.

~~~
deminature
I'm not sure I follow how Google helped create a trend of increasingly bloated
sites that don't load quickly? The only sites I see loading remotely as
quickly as AMP sites are AMP sites. Nothing comes close, nor is it apparent
online publishers are even trying to optimize their pages to load quickly. AMP
strikes me as a project of desperation by Google, as publishers seem intent to
kill their own sites by loading them with as many XML HTTP requests and
trackers as possible.

~~~
CaptSpify
Google has been encouraging those sites to run all that extra cruft by:

A) Not de-ranking sites that are large and slow

B) Asking them to run a bunch of unnecessary trackers (Google Analytics)

I've never used AMP, but it does sound like it is fast, and web-page bloat is
indeed a problem. But adding another layer (which also just happens to make
you more beholden to Google) isn't the right way to fix that problem, removing
the bloated layers is.

~~~
deminature
They absolutely do take load speed into account when ranking pages.

[https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-
speed-i...](https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2018/01/using-page-speed-in-
mobile-search.html)

~~~
CaptSpify
Yes, they do. My apologies if I seemed to imply that they don't.

They don't weight it high it enough. The fact that it took until 2018 until
they did that for mobile is telling enough.

------
mattferderer
I've tried AMP a couple times only to get rid of it.

It's a nice bar to set for websites to compete against. I think Google
rightfully so should penalize bloated & slow sites.

It's easy to create something better than AMP's experience. It takes a little
time optimizing your site to create a pleasant interface & experience.

The majority of sites I see that are below the AMP bar, are sites that choose
to be that way with lots of ads & pop ups. They do it because these things
help them make money. So for them they have little incentive to use AMP. A lot
of them make some of that money with Google Ads though.

So at the end of the day, I really don't see who AMP is for.

~~~
stochastic_monk
It’s tough. At the same time, I think website content should matter over
style.

~~~
yostrovs
Agreed. The obsession with page load times tilts the equation toward sites
that spend more money on developers than content creators. Nothing against
developers, but people indeed are looking for content rather than fast sites.
I'd be happy to wait another second if the site I'm going to visit has more
relevant stuff to what I searched for. Perhaps if a site is terribly slow,
that's one thing, but differentiating sites based on microsecond differences
is preposterous.

~~~
joegahona
I agree, but is there proof that Google is differentiating sites "based on
microsecond differences"?

~~~
yostrovs
The ranking algorithm is secret, so one can't know much about how it actually
works. But, considering how much effort is spent to increase site speeds, the
reality is that that's the impression that developers and site owners have.

~~~
joegahona
Agree with you that that's the impression those people have. I wish Google
would be more transparent about the reality. The only thing I've heard actual
Google employees say is stuff like "the speed portion of the algorithm will
affect only the slowest sites." So if a shitty site like Forbes or CNN is
reducing their mobile time from 20 seconds (likely on their bloated regular
site) to less than 1 second (AMP) maybe that will give them a boost. But if my
site loads in 3 seconds now and goes to less than 1 second on AMP, is it
really worth it for me...

------
lazycouchpotato
I like the idea of AMP but its implementation by Google is so poor. It's just
way too buggy for me. Websites will load only as much as my phone's screen
allows - when I try to scroll down nothing happens. Other times it's just a
blank page.

AMP convinced me to stop using Google's mobile website and switch to
DuckDuckGo, and as an added bonus I can View Image from image search results.

EDIT: Forgot about how Google refuses to serve their modern version of
Google.com on Firefox Android. That was the final nail in the coffin for me.

------
mherrmann
AMP simply goes too far for me. Google Search already decides which sites we
see. Now they want to control what we see on those sites too? Nu-uh.

------
cjbayliss
I found the article an interesting read, however I couldn't help but think we
are talking about AMP and small sites on Medium. When I download that article
from Medium with wget I receive a 142K html file that is surprisingly small in
this day and age, but still bloated more than is needs to be.

Using this script[0], I was able to get it down to 14K. Then further cleaning
it up in emacs and adding <img> tags, I got the html down to 10k. That means
it should take probably less than 5 seconds to load the html (not including
the massive images) on a 5KB/s connection in Australia (more common thank you
might think in the country areas, although getting much better with the NBN
roll out) or any other 3rd world internet countries.

You can test the resulting html in this gist[1]. Please note I did that in
about 20mins, and did not test on mobile, so it is not perfect. I expect the
images need to be scaled to fit on mobile. Also I only used the <style> tag to
keep it as one file, I don't recommend doing that on real websites.

I really hope more people start caring about saving bandwidth and client side
resources (CPU, RAM, etc.)

[0]:
[https://gist.github.com/cjbayliss/b0042b5c7b46aebd5b40a85855...](https://gist.github.com/cjbayliss/b0042b5c7b46aebd5b40a85855bb4c6e)

[1]:
[https://gist.github.com/cjbayliss/4b9f5b5cc7a4dde8efcb4b06c1...](https://gist.github.com/cjbayliss/4b9f5b5cc7a4dde8efcb4b06c1a7890e)

------
fouc
Does anyone think google is engaging in anti-trust/monopoly-building actions
by prioritizing AMP pages

~~~
canadianwriter
The only way they "prioritize" them is with the lightning symbol. They don't
get better ranking just because they are AMP.

~~~
manigandham
Ranking is effectively higher placement on the page, and the AMP links
carousel is the highest on the page. The outcome is the same, regardless of
methodology.

~~~
ocdtrekkie
Indeed, when Google claims they don't favor AMP pages, they're being
disingenuous. Just like suggestions that you can't pay them for higher
rankings: You absolutely can, because Google Ads go on top, and they're barely
distinguishable from native results.

------
myth_buster
> Sometimes the cover-up is more damaging than the crime.

I hate walled gardens. What troubles me more is that something that came from
addressing a competitor's product (Fb's Instant Articles in this case) has
grown to do more damage than what Instant Articles could have in the first
place.

As for the Google Amp URL, they are working on fixing it.
[https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/950549603975233536](https://twitter.com/cramforce/status/950549603975233536)

~~~
chatmasta
They’re not fixing it, they’re forcing major browser vendors to patch their
software to insert a different URL (the publisher’s) into the address bar than
the one that was actually loaded (google.com).

Personally I hope Apple continues to ignore the AMP standard and leaves the
links broken on iOS Safari, because it’s the only way to make it obvious to
users what’s happening. Google is trying to sweep it under the rug; hopefully
Apple doesn’t let them get away with it.

------
cjhanks
My personal experience has been that a large number of AMP pages never load.
If I search the article title on Google and click the non AMP page, it loads
fine. Even after doing that and going back to the AMP link, still won't load.

I am fairly sure the product is not working as expected... My experience is on
an Android Pixel 2 - so it's not like I am not a target market.

------
gonational
From an end-user perspective, my solution to the degradation of Google was to
switch to DuckDuckGo.com.

About one year ago when I switched there were a few things that annoyed me,
but it’s become a great experience since then... and they’re not tracking me.

Do it, and you won’t regret it.

------
ryanjodonnell
AMP pages rarely work for me when opening from Feedly and sometimes Twitter.

------
gervase
I'm not sure, but it seems like the site/service this article is referencing
is for either coders, or people who need coders, but either way is targeting a
more-technical / business-oriented audience.

What is the overlap on the Venn diagram between "people who like to use AMP"
and "people who are technical enough to need this service"? My first instinct
would be that it's low.

~~~
nate
Hey! Thanks for the comment, but I'm not quite sure what you mean. Yep,
Rockstar is a bunch of developers helping other businesses make software. I
wrote the article because there's a lot of people who are considering AMP
whether your technically minded or your on the business side asking your
developers (or us at Rockstar) to AMPlify all the things. Thought it would be
fair warning for all those groups. Also, I don't write for the sole purpose of
"content marketing" to an audience that needs us at Rockstar. I've been a
developer for 20+ years. I write what I write about :) Sometimes it'll draw in
customers, sometimes new friends and colleagues. And sometimes I just like to
show funny pictures of my daughter.

------
vfc1
Its by far the quality of the content that matters the most for ranking on
Google search engine, much more than the speed of the page.

If the page speed is acceptable, its going to be ranked over an AMP page if
the content is better.

Content is the key, build better content, that solves better a concrete
problem that visitors have: that is how you win visitors trust and get higher
rankings at the same time.

------
adventured
> There’s little reason that a small company website that could load in 100ms
> as a static site of all HTML and no Javascript is actually a 100MB React app

AMP is the developer equivalent of getting a gastric bypass surgery because
you refuse to control yourself and live a healthy lifestyle.

There's a very obvious solution here to the AMP issues that people keep
writing about: stop building massively bloated sites, where the bloat
inevitably acts to abuse users rather than provide a better experience. AMP
isn't necessary at all. It is that simple. No, you don't need 600kb of CSS. No
you don't need 8mb of JavaScript. Just stop building like that, there's a
better way. Put your obese, lazy sites on a healthy diet and exercise regimen.

------
technion

        100% on Google Lighthouse
    

Something is awry here. Putting AMP on a page immediately gets you points
removed for "Uses inefficient cache policy on static assets" for the inclusion
of v0.js.

------
vtail
The author seem to be implying conversion loss from pre/post which may be
affected from many factors including seasonality - I’m wondering why didn’t he
do an A/B for a radical design like that?

~~~
nate
I did actually split test. I had traffic going to both types of our landing
pages. I didn't like the AMP results but there wasn't enough traffic yet to
draw the conclusion, so I just put all the traffic there and measure across
time periods a bit.

As for seasonality, that's a fine argument. But overall traffic was consistent
across these weeks measured. Also, our conversion rate was awesome through US
holidays like July 4. Also, as soon as I got rid of AMP, immediately our
conversion rate is back. It's pretty stark how bad AMP was for us.

~~~
vtail
Ah ok that make sense. Not sure how you measure conversion, but in our case
(I’m in B2C ecommerce) both traffic and conversion often fluctuates, so if one
is stable doesn’t mean that the other won’t move.

------
Jedi72
Google you are supposed to help me search digital documents to find ones
relevant to me. I dont even care if they're slow, you are a search engine not
tye internet police.

------
rsoto
Unrelated to this topic, but still speaking about AMP: has anyone done
integration tests with AMP pages? It seems that it's impossible to achieve
that, and since AMP has its own async module with amp-forms and amp-mustache,
I'm a little nervous about replacing a normal landing page with an AMP page
that has errors on its scripting.

I've looked everywhere, but to no avail. Can anyone shed some light on this?

------
xmatos
AMP is not about fast websites, better user experience for either users or
publishers, nor a trusted platform.

It's about google hosting your site and capturing data from it. It's a shitty
idea and i can't understand why people use it.

Yes, make your website fast, please. There're plenty of guidelines and tests
for that, but you don't need amp for that.

------
tdelet
AMP is the worst. I used to get rid of it by going through
encrypted.google.com, but unfortunately that's been shut down and I haven't
figured out how to use google and not use AMP. But I still want to.

I do find myself using Chrome on android less and less primarily because of
AMP

~~~
timbit42
What about StartPage.com ? It's Google search results without any Google crap.

------
pawurb
You can remove Google AMP without hurting organic traffic and web performance
[https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-
performance](https://pawelurbanek.com/amp-seo-rating-performance)

------
nsmog767
Google's goal is to not increase your conversion rate; it's for users to go
back to the search results and click on an ad.

I work extensively in SEO and have never recommended AMP for this reason.

------
saluki
Matrix Dodging Bullets
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQBJiEiB9Os](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TQBJiEiB9Os)

------
auslander
GETF (Google Engineering Task Force) says AMP is mandatory. Fix your browsers
and move content to Google official servers before January 2020.

------
owens99
Another thing to consider: Google is blocked in China, so AMP doesn't matter
if you are looking for a truly global presence.

------
throw2016
The argument against amp is based on moats and monopoly but millions of people
who make money from Google are unlikely to care about these things. They will
do anything to get better revenue or rankings.

This is where consumer choice and free markets break down, and regulations
become important. That's why dumping is a illegal, because consumers are not
going to turn away from cheap products because of bad actors.

In the real world you need regulations.

------
eruci
The same happened with a site I manage after I enabled AMP.

We've been doing the Google dance to their tune for too long.

------
fudoo
AMP is just another reason to block third party scripts. If your page is
blank, I'm going elsewhere.

------
preparedzebra
The speed of computers has scaled / is scaling so quickly. IMO avoiding JS
completely is ridiculous.

------
tyler33
Monopolies don't care about you

------
homero
Why does Google tell me I'm logged into Google on amp pages? It makes no
sense.

------
orthecreedence
Um, google is taking people's pages and hosting them themselves? That seems
like a copyright violation to me. If my website was being mirrored by google
and they diverted traffic to the mirror instead of my own website, I'd be
filing a DMCA pretty quick.

Or is AMP opt-in?

~~~
ilikehurdles
AMP is opt-in.

~~~
orthecreedence
Thanks, I did a lot of searching and was not able to find this info, so I
appreciate you answering.

------
tomphoolery
A 500% boost in conversion rate is 5 people if your original conversion rate
is 0%. Quit pretending like what you're doing is special.

~~~
matt4077
0% -> 5 people is actually ∞%, not 500%.

------
cphoover
AMP was always a bad idea.

------
Karishma1234
A consultant I worked with would charge lots of $$$ for basically doing to his
large enterprise clients. For example we would go into a meeting with 4 random
employees and then charge $250 per hour per person.

He joked to me and said that this money is essentially "stupidity tax" on
these large enterprises because they can't navigate their way through even
some trivial tech problems.

AMP is one such stupidity tax in my personal opinion. I have worked for many
years in web performance optimisation and I realise that every internet
business must pay a good close attention to it but most of them are
incompetent to do that. Their webpages are bloated. Just check how heavy is
the page for forbes.com and you will realise the problem.

AMP sets a standard where even with low quality developers you can have nice
fast loading pages. It is very similar to those Javascript wrappers that force
typed variables and semicolons.

IF you are already having a good web team don't waste time on AMP unless there
is some real demonstrable benefit.

~~~
da02
What type of consultant was he? Marketing or web app development? Did he have
decades of experience to charge such rates?

(I agree with everything else you have said. My Xioami smartphone from 2014 is
faster than the Packard-Bell computer I used back in the mid-90s... yet
companies always find a way to slow things down. They used to do it with
Flash. One catalog company even did their ENTIRE website in Flash... when
people were still using 56k modems and DSL was not as widespread as before.)

~~~
Karishma1234
Data integration consultant with around 10 years of experience. Sounds fancy
but it was about making sure their Facebook posts also get tweeted, when they
post a new YouTube video it also gets published to their FB Page, that they
are able to connect their Salesforce with Slack (or suggest them to use Slack)
and blah.

He even worked with a bank that decided to close down their website and redo
entire netbanking in some .net based installable app because it was supposedly
secure. After spending a lot of money and a pilot with 10,000 users they
discovered that nearly 80% of their users who were forced to use it simply
move the money out of the bank.

All this was tech incompetence tax.

~~~
da02
Why don't you go into that field? Is it because soul-crushing to talk to
customers who waste money like that? Too much competition?

~~~
Karishma1234
You can not win these kind of contracts easily. You need to have ex-classmates
inside who will make the right introductions. You need to hang out with right
people, please them and so on. Race, Sex also plays a big role. For example
overwhelmingly white people will chose a white person over an Indian and vice
versa.

While the tech work is pretty less, the social engineering involved is hard to
scale.

------
just_observing
Q: Did Google create - and promote from their dominant position - AMP for
anyone but their own interests?

A: No. Why would you be so naive to think otherwise?

~~~
cortesoft
This is a pretty silly argument.... every company's decisions are based on
their own interest. That doesn't mean that your interest and theirs don't
align.

------
preparedzebra
The speed of the web is scaling very quickly. IMO avoiding JS completely is
ridiculous.

~~~
amiga-workbench
JS doesn't just incur a bandwidth cost, you have parse time and then the hit
on your users framerate when you naively fiddle with the DOM or override the
scrolling behaviour.

------
matt4077
There's really not enough information in the article to judge its validity...

Some comparisons between devices, as but one example, could support the idea
that AMP affects conversion rate (AMP is only shown on mobile).

As it is, I have my doubts that the mechanisms he speculates could have such
an impact. URLs, for example, are really de-emphasised on mobile.

------
graycat
From the OP:

"There’s nothing that magical about it. A big part of its performance boost is
simply its standards: no javascript, all inline CSS, and CSS can only measure
50KB or less. You’re going to make any page load faster with those
requirements."

Gee, for my startup, that's the way I wrote my Web pages from the beginning!
Microsoft's ASP.NET wrote a little, simple JavaScript for me, but for using my
Web pages that JavaScript is optional.

------
canada_dry
Or... maybe it's not AMPs fault (not that I'm a fan of AMP). Maybe it's just
that Ruby is quickly going out of vogue and you're just seeing the signs.

~~~
richjdsmith
Ah good, I was hoping for the "Hurdy Hur Hur Ruby is slow so Rails is slow
crowd to show"

Ruby "going out of vogue" has nothing to do with the authors problem. It
wouldn't matter if the author was using TrendyNewFramework.js™, PHP, Django or
some GO framework. The issue seems to be the terrible user experience that
comes with using AMP. I know I personally hate it and tend to drop off when I
see it begin loading.

Also FWIW, there's plenty of slow SPA's built on the latest and greatest, and
there's plenty of fast rails sites (have you been to
[https://dev.to](https://dev.to) recently? It's like ️). Rails is doing just
fine.

