Why do you want to visit the original page? It looks the same or worse than the AMP version that already loaded.
Same goes for reading more about the author. How often do you do that, and do you do it before you even read the article?
For visiting the homepage, almost every AMP page I go to these days as a big logo at the top linking to their (real) homepage, so there's 0 difference for the user.
The only valid one is comment section. I just tried a few articles, and they seem to have a button which redirects to the real website. I think that's a fair compromise. Honestly most article sites do this anyway, load the comments after a click.
Absolutely, for example if I've read the story before and I'm just googling it now to reference it.
Furthermore, I care not that it is the same number of clicks, I care that users can access my website in a way that conforms to their expectations for the rest of the web. That's the crux of my problem with AMP. If it was everything except the page cache it would a lot better.
Before today, here's what it looked like:
Real web: 1. Click on Google search result 2. Read article 3. Click share and get real URL
AMP: 1. Click on Google search result 2. Read article 3. Click share and realize that you're on an AMP page which is broken for anything other than mobile web browsers 4. Either go back to the search results to find the non-AMP URL or navigate to the publisher's site and use site search find the real URL 5. Share the real URL
As of today, Google has made this a little faster but it's still an extra step: 4. Click on the small link icon in the header to display the real URL 5. Share the real URL
That's still considerably worse than the standard web experience. The only reason anyone is defending this is because it's associated with Google.
We wouldn't need AMP if the average website experience didn't suck. It's unfortunate that most websites cannot do this[0] without Google forcing them to, but that's the world we live in.
> The issue is that google has been pushing these slow, bulky pages to the top of their results, then they swoop in with AMP to fix the problem. The problem AMP is trying to solve is very real, but the answer isn't to consolidate things further into google's ecosystem.
Literally the only reason to use google. It just happens to be useful to click into the URL most times, but finding the URL is what matters. I can fill in the rest of the usability myself if I really want it.
Also, if I ask for an orange and I'm handed an apple, I'll stop asking you for anything.
Conversions, and time on the site, matter. Becoming a one-hit-wonder at most, is a broken practice for the way the business side of most websites functions.