The End of AMP?
Dwayne Lafleur (via Hacker News):
Google provided a distinct advantage to sites using AMP – priority placement on the world’s largest traffic source – Google search. I’ve had the pleasure of working with more than twenty thousand publishers in the five years since AMP’s launch, and I don’t believe I’ve ever heard a single reason that a publisher uses AMP other than to obtain this priority placement.
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The good news is that, in May [2021], this is all about to change. Part of the Google update is that all pages with high Page Experience scores are eligible to be in the featured top news carousel. This effectively means that publishers will no longer be forced to use AMP and can instead provide fast, rich experiences on their own domains.
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The good news gets even better; non-AMP pages make considerably more revenue per pageview than AMP pages. Initially, I assumed this was due to the nature of how ads load on AMP, however, recent Antitrust lawsuits have proposed that hindering ad competition was a feature and that all non-amp ad tags, such as my company, Ezoic’s, were delayed by 1 second to make them less effective.
Let us hope this marks the rapid decline of a proprietary format designed to replicate the open standards of the web in a way that Google can more readily control and track.
The Google AMP cache is the cross-site tracking stunt of the decade. How did they get away with serving others’ content under google.com for all these years, with full access to people’s Google login cookies, while making the actual content providers into 3rd-parties?
Marko Saric (via Hacker News):
From the release of the Core Web Vitals and the page experience algorithm, there is no longer any preferential treatment for Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) in Google’s search results, Top Stories carousel and the Google News. Google will even remove the AMP badge icon from the search results.
You can now safely ignore Google AMP when building a more diverse and more exciting web without any artificial restrictions set by the adtech giant.
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Google AMP was never popular. It was controversial from the day it was introduced and received a big push back and a lot of hate but Google stuck to its guns for years.
There’s been a lot of antitrust scrutiny on Google and it may have played a role in this change of heart.
Previously:
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Yeah, I kind of loathe the appification of everything and if Amp had fought that, then great. But it sadly didn't and legitimately fast non Amp websites were still punished in search rankings. So screw Amp.
People should decrapify their sites and the web would get much faster. Indeed.
A friend of mine worked on a native app for a newspaper.
"Why do they need a native app?"
"The web is too slow."
Naturally their site was filled to the brim with bullshit, and the app wasn't.
When AMP was announced I thought it was an attempt to kill all the bullshit on the web. That didn't happen. Not sure if that was even the aim anymore. Still perplexed why companies are OK with bullshit on the web but not in their apps.