Airbnb is putting AMP at the core of its digital strategy
medium.com
medium.com
The reason to use AMP is SEO. If you want literally any benefit other than SEO, just improve the performance on your own mobile site. Then you won't have to jump through weird hoops and come up with entirely new "magic carpet" user flows, because you'll actually control your own content on your own site.
The talk attached to this Medium piece was given at "TechSEO Boost", but the article itself dances around ever using the term. So we're left to wonder why AirBnb is very worried about being able to link users to their native app, while they apparently don't care at all about whether users are using their web site. It's because of SEO.
> the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) project, which has some powerful backers including Google
> It would be fair to say that Google has been a very vocal supporter of the initiative from day one.
These are really weird ways of describing a Google-owned, Google-pushed initiative.
It's a growth hack to get better organic search traffic, with user experience performance improvements a secondary concern.
When a big company like Airbnb jumps on a technology bandwagon people notice, and write-ups like this influence the choices other organisations make. They could at least just be upfront about the reasons why they're doing it.
The search benefit isn't even a long-term one: Either AMP will go away for some reason at some point, or, if the status quo is maintained, everyone will be forced to use AMP by Google's search monopoly, rendering it a null benefit to your rankings as everyone else transitions to it.
Maybe in the long term, but meanwhile they get the benefits for being early adopters. If AMP fails, they will simply roll back.
> it's very unlikely that Airbnb wants to admit they're probably being paid for it or getting some other form of special consideration for writing this.
It doesn't look like anyone from Airbnb wrote this. But you're right, that's a good strategy - instead of the accommodation and experiences thing, they should implement AMP and get paid by Google for it. That's how business works: https://i.imgur.com/Vd6gI7X.jpg?1h
Congratulations Brian and Gil on implementing this!
"We could do that, but then we'd lose the special AMP placement on Google SERPs" is a much more compelling argument, and preferable to starting a proxy war between the CMO and the CTO.
Google has done a hell of a job flexing their Search muscles to encourage the behavior they want, here. All the while somehow open-washing the project so that SEO-types make the ridiculous statements you quoted, implying that AMP isn't a Google owned-and-run project.
On an engineering level, I respect AMP. From an anti-competitive / social engineering perspective, it's absolutely terrifying.
Google engineers seem to have a hard time differentiating between a platform and a framework. PWAs and suffer from the exact same problem. They’re great if you build a greenfield product to their exact specs, but difficult to use otherwise.
I take a look at the average mobile web page and thank Google that AMP brings sone restrictions.
From a technical standpoint it wouldn't surprise me if people start proposing binary formats that beat text/plain + gzip in size and speed.
Webassembly
That's exactly what they are doing with Instant Apps, they just try different strategies to control the web more at the same time.
How is limiting size and server round-trips of CSS not related to the problem being solved by AMP?
For more details, you can read the (very readable) AMP docs: https://www.ampproject.org/docs/guides/how_cached
Here’s the section on guidelines for implementing an AMP cache: https://github.com/ampproject/amphtml/blob/master/spec/amp-c...
Airbnb really doesn’t.
There's many downsides, but, for example...Google carousel results inject JavaScript that allows the end customer to left or right swipe right to a competitor...if you choose the AMP path.
I'm not clear on why Google doesn't give control of the top banner to publishers.
AMP is slower than hand-optimized HTML.
AMP pages are often hosted on a 3rd party domain, even sending the wrong referrers to other sites.
AMP is also extremely slow on desktop browsers that have certain ad-blockers installed. If 3rd party scripts don't load, the user gets a blank page for 8 seconds. (Try it if you don't believe me.)
* Sure, but do you really care that users are using your physical servers or just that the content is out there? It's a trade that I think a lot of businesses would be happy to make. Who wouldn't want essentially free hosting complete with ad revenue?
* Do you think ad funded sites care about people who have a worse user experience with an ad blocker.
I don't disagree that AMP is bad for the open web, but it's not bad for the people publishing with it.
It does matter that users are on your physical servers. It affects referrers and copied/pasted links, which affect brand recognition and SEO. Using AMP also puts a giant back button on your site that takes users back to the search engine results rather than deeper into your site. Many people do not want that.
I don't think that airbnb is an ad-funded site. Even if it were, do ad-funded sites really want a 3rd party dictating how they monetize their sites? If so, I doubt that they are thinking through it all the way and considering the long-term effects.
Not someone. A corporation. Think bigger companies, not tiny one person sites. Just because it's possible doesn't mean they can win the sprint cycle.
I heard the same thing said about Medium and Facebook News. Whatever happened to "fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me".
You can get damned close--and even exceed it if you're a minimalist--by throwing every bleeding-edge performance optimization under the sun at it, but nothing is going to stop marketers throwing Adobe's render-blocking VisitorAPI in the <head> to offset many of those optimizations, either. (Seriously, and you can't async it, either. Marketers get angry and Adobe doesn't support it.)
The advantage of AMP dissipates rapidly as one tests in 4G and low-end cable speeds, however. At that point, hitting a 1s-2s SpeedIndex isn't terribly difficult if you're using front-end performance best practices, even with a framework bootstrapping itself to the DOM.
Yep, because as that demographic becomes the majority they will then be forced to move from an ad funded model solely or perish.
AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages. Being extremely slow on desktop browsers with certain ad-blockers seems like an edge case of the least importance.
Loading 3rd party JavaScript without restriction is extremely unsafe and not an edge case. It's basic Web-browsing safety.
But the focus of the project is on the mobile experience. Complaining about the lack of optimization on the desktop experience, with an ad-blocker to boot, for a mobile specific project is an edge case, in my opinion.
The more people treat it with contempt, the higher its value becomes for the others due to its only advantage, getting a SEO boost from Google.
Also, marketing people (in some cases for good reason) already feel locked-in by and fully dependent on Google with >50% of their traffic coming from there.
They shouldn't put AMP at the core of their strategy. It's enough to just make proper pages (the page referenced in the link is now much slimmer)
For a website like Airbnb, 1.9M for total asset size doesn't seem bad...
Seriously, use it on a connection with packet loss and it will corrupt your application state so hard you will have to switch browsers to resolve it.
Its levels upon levels. You keep having to drill 2 or 3 levels down, but then lose the context of the higher levels when you do. For instance, when you finally click on a property, this now opens a new tab. But now this property tab doesn't show a map...so if you are looking at 4 properties, you now need to keep the "main map" page open so you can manually cross-reference what properties are where.
Effectively its impossible to get anything done with having 3 or 4 tabs open all dedicated to Airbnb. Love the service and the places I wind up finding, but their website really needs a re-think.
I furrowed a brow and thought to myself, "this, from a company with lots of hype and accolades". But OK, certificate revocation is not very well implemented around the industry, so maybe just an honest mistake.
Facebook (especially Instant Articles and video rehosting[0]) is awful for very similar reasons.
What's pernicious about AMP & co. is seizure of control and immense abuse potential that comes with preventing visitors from hitting content creators' domains.
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[0] http://splitsider.com/2018/02/how-facebook-is-killing-comedy...
One thing that always I feel on discussions about AMP is that is something that is going to happen, and is not, is happening right now, regular users are already having better and great experiences on mobile.
That is the good side that I see of the project, Google was capable of do that in about 2 years. Pushing development best practices seems that was not enough, companies stills doing awful job on the performance side of their websites.
AMP was like force companies to do other version of their websites with limitations that prevent doing stupid development and design decisions like js/css/html bloat, repeat components and more.
You like that beautiful readable and organized Medium post?, is a good experience right?, well, it happens that the editor has a lot of limitations like only let you choose 3 text hierarchies, 3 image sizes, one font family, no colors, etc. For me AMP is something like that but in the development side instead on the visual design side.
The terrifying part is that Google has created a parallel version of the web who fill their needs, a stripped down version[1] that feels like an authoritarian power blocks the freedom that the "native" web always has, also happens that this parallel version has some advantages and people are loving it.
I see AMP as a temporary patch of the web.
To my mind, AMP is a content reassociation tool, not a content distribution speedup tool. It succeeds in both, was designed as the former, and marketed as the latter. If Airbnb goes through with this folly, how exactly will they retain their business?
Google will be essentially filtering every booking that goes to Airbnb, controlling both the customer and the listings. I see most comments on HN are in agreement with this view, and those that aren't don't seem to meet the quality level normal to HN. Makes you wonder who exactly made this decision...
FUD.
Is it something I have to turn on or is it restricted to certain countries?
I browse from Norway.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/techcrunch.com/2018/02/13/amp-f...
Maybe they are afraid that EU will smack them down for anti-competitive behaviour.
The link posted above will show a prominent "techcrunch.com" at the top - but the URL is still Google. I am not redirected to their own site.
That's not all there is to it, though. There's a whole Polymer-esque AMP JS framework that Google is pushing people to use [0]. While it does some great things, it's still absolutely an attempt at vendor lockin.
There are many redeeming qualities to AMP, including its significant technical merit, but the subset claim is neither accurate nor the strongest argument.