Google Accelerated Mobile Pages project wants to get you to content faster

The search engine introduced Wednesday a new project named Accelerated Mobile Pages, which aims to dramatically improve performance and download speed of mobile web pages. It is based entirely on existing technologies already supported by browsers and makes it easy for web developers to build lightweight mobile sites that load quickly without sacrificing content. AMP HTML is also supportive of advertising platforms, combining adverts on pages into the reflowed content so it becomes part of the responsive experience. “Google’s taking a more publisher-friendly approach that achieves the same thing”, Grant Whitmore, a digital executive at the New York Daily News, said. Google plans to make AMP available to any publisher, but for now it is using the Facebook Instant Articles model of accepting one publisher at a time.

“Every time a web page takes too long to load, they lose a reader – and the opportunity to earn revenue through advertising or subscriptions”, said David Besbris, vice-president of engineering at Google’s search division.

While Accelerated Mobile Pages will not be immune to adblockers, Google and publishers say the new format will lend itself to a more consumer-friendly ad experience where ads load instantly.

Several major mobile players have recently rolled out their own methods of speeding up web articles to get you reading content faster.

The idea behind AMP is to simplify how web pages are rendered on a mobile device.

Google met with technology companies and publishers recently to discuss the issue of slow loading websites on mobile, an issue they believe causes significant revenue loss for website owners.

Google is working with dozens of big publishers to speed up the bloated mobile web. At a press event in New York, Richard Gingras, Google’s head of news and social, skirted the question of whether AMP was being positioned as a competitor to Facebook’s product, according to TechCrunch. “[AMP] is just one of the components we will look at in order to give readers the best ranked articles and it is up to the publishers how they want to make their content faster”.

Google encouraged users to experience the new feature at a demo site. So will Google reserve that theoretical space – which should be worth a lot to the people who theoretically occupy it – exclusively for publishers who use the new format? On the other hand, publishers that are posed to team with Google in this include Vox.com, La Stampa, Buzzfeed, Washington Post, and Twitter. The technical specs and codes for this are provided by GitHub.