Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Behind the Scenes of AMP at Condé Nast

Oscar Perez:

AMP increases the visibility and discoverability of our content by allowing it to be included in Google’s Top News Carousel, as well as improving the experience of regular Google search results.

[…]

We went live with Google AMP on Vanity Fair a little over a year ago. Post-launch, the traffic and search rank results were very positive: click through rate from Google search went from 5.9% (Regular) to 10.3% (AMP), and average search position went from 5.9 (Regular) to 1.7 (AMP). Since then, we have deployed AMP across fifteen of our brands and we have been very pleased with the results. Today, AMP accounts for 79% of our mobile search traffic and 36% of our total mobile visits.

Via Nick Heer:

AMP allows website owners a quick and relatively easy way to juice their search rankings. That’s all this is. There are certainly other ways to create a beautiful and fast website, but none of them get a website into the very prominent news carousel at the top of Google search result pages and Google News.

[…]

Just to be clear: AMP’s specifications require that pages link to this script: https://cdn.ampproject.org/v0.js. For a page to be valid AMP HTML, it must include that JavaScript file, which is hosted by Google.

Alex Kras (via Hacker News):

I understand that a lot of users DO like AMP content. I completely respect their right to enjoy it. But it would be nice if Twitter provided an option to opt-out from that experience for those who don’t.

For example, today I saw a post that David Walsh shared on Twitter. I clicked on the link, and was taken to the AMP version of his site. David has a very nice and easily recognizable blog. When I saw the content that looked different I had to pause. I wasn’t sure if I clicked on a phishing link or something else like that. Once I realized that it was just an AMP version of his site, I move on with my day. I wish I could opt-out from that experience.

2 Comments RSS · Twitter

Google is a very vocal supporter of net neutrality and also is responsible for AMP. Reconciling these two data points is an exercise for the reader.

Clickthrough rate went up because Google put them in the front, not because things load faster.

Publishers this dumb deserve to be fucked.

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