Google wants websites to adopt AMP as the default for building webpages
polemicdigital.com
polemicdigital.com
This reads in places like a developer or publisher who has grown accustomated to stuffing his pages with gobs and gobs of javascript and questionable UI patterns and is now outraged at the prospect that someone wants to take that privilege away from him. I can't agree with that.
Examples:
> The underlying message is clear: Google wants full equivalency between AMP and canonical URL. Every element that is present on a website’s regular version should also be present on its AMP version: every navigation item, every social media sharing button, every comment box, every image gallery.
So Google's suggestion is that, if you've already chosen to offer an AMP page, that page shouldn't have intentionally worse usability than the original?
> For years Google has been nudging webmasters to create better websites – ‘better’ meaning ‘easier for Google to understand’. Technologies like XML sitemaps and schema.org structured data are strongly supported by Google because they make the search engine’s life easier.
Other initiatives like disavow files and rel=nofollow help Google keep its link graph clean and free from egregious spam. All the articles published on Google’s developer website are intended to ensure the chaotic, messy web becomes more like a clean, easy-to-understand web. In other words, a Google-shaped web. This is a battle Google has been fighting for decades.
Sitemaps and structured data were the non-proprietary attempts to structure the web. Those could have made the web more accessible for everyone, not just Google. They are something fundamentally different than AMP.
Yet, he condemns them too? Why?
He seems to argue that the chaos and messiness of the web infrastructure is itself a quality that should be defended. Why would that be the case?
Google is using its dominance in search (again) to force sites to offer AMP versions. Like a "reader view", and lacking evidence at the moment, I bet many sites are building AMP versions with faster load times but reduced features to comply. Now Google is saying "Build your entire site according to our spec, or we'll de-rank you on search".
That is a very bold move, and one that would be making front-page news if they said it straight-up in a way that Buzzfeed could write about.
I do think there could be a case made for Google abusing their power here but frankly I'm on their side for this: one site, one representation.
If you want a lighter load for mobile users, provide a lighter version for every user. If you want to keep features available, allow users to opt-in or out to such features.
There's nothing wrong with having different mobile and desktop experiences. Just make sure they have feature parity and behave in similar, expected ways.
Which is the concern here. Abuse of power in order to push your own agenda could just as easily turn into abuse of power to push an agenda you despise.
I don't think that's a good idea. "Mobile first" doesn't mean "mobile everywhere". You can use umatrix and stylus Firefox extensions to eliminate most page bloat. Firefox's reader view can give the same look to each page if that's what you want.
Destroying the open WWW for the purpose of making all websites look the same on all devices doesn't seem like a good justification.
There's also the sites that take control of my keys so I can't use them to navigate; or those that disable operating system features such as copy and paste. Both of those are the opposite of useful.
If you want more trust: build and sign a native application, and don't be overly generous on the permissions you request. There's no reason a message app needs audio permission until the moment I intentionally start or join a voice conversation. Same for the camera. Same for saving data to the local disk, too, really. There's definitely no reason you should need administrator permission. And that permission should be revoked when the conversation is done.
Sadly, the reality is that the majority don't want to make the effort.
For news articles at least, the only way to be shown at the top of the search results is to write your page using AMP: https://searchengineland.com/googles-amp-carousel-working-se....
Edit: from Google's own documentation (https://developers.google.com/search/docs/guides/mark-up-con...): "The Top stories carousel requires that your content be published in AMP".
This is on an Android phone, using Chrome, with a US ip.
The "benefits" shouldn't be used as a factor to rank results either.
I want the best page content-wise for my search. Not the fastest to load with irrelevant results.
Besides what kind of "proof" do you expect to see? All their rankings are hidden behind several layers of secrecy, and it's not like Google will come out and say it by themselves.
Web search is a public resource at this point, and Google is percentage-wise a monopoly on it, so we should dispense with opaque algorithms and behind the scenes manipulations.
It's bad for society and bad for democracy.
They should be forced to be able to explain any ranking, and give their algorithm at any point in time.
> So Google's suggestion is that, if you've already chosen to offer an AMP page, that page shouldn't have intentionally worse usability than the original?
Take a moment to read that again. Mobile has constrained screen real-estate, constrained bandwidth, and navigation typically requires fingers covering the screen - and yet it's still supposed to support everything the full site does, and be more performant, and (it looks like) all be done in a particular framework?
Google is talking crosswise, it's no wonder AMP is a pain that only benefits Google.
But based on the way you use it, the canonical version would be whatever the primary version of the site/page is, most likely the non-mobile version (among other things, this is the URL search results would send you to [0]). It all reads like the AMP version is supposed to replace the regular mobile version.
[0] https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en#wh...
Well, it's not your job to agree with that or not though. He should be free to do as he pleases (so, the freedom to spew gobs of JS etc. should be unarguable) and you should be free to not visit his page.
The average person can’t tell in advance — or, often, after the event — that this will happen, and when it does happen it is bad for them.
Aside from the security issues, the current status quo shortens battery life, wastes bandwidth (which is still precious and limited on mobile, even if not on landlines), and is generally done for the benefit of everyone except the user.
If they can tell in advance, they can tell it after, and punish the page by not visiting it.
If they can't tell it after the event, then it shouldn't matter.
If they didn’t kill you by cancer and heart disease, but instead one in 1.4 million exploded and blew your head off, you’d know. Everyone would. The most explody brand would be punished.
The constant bit-by-bit risk of 1.4 cigarettes per micromort makes it ignorable, even though the risk is identical.
The only website I punish for their JavaScript content at the moment is forbes.com, and that’s because they have a combination of an adblock-blocker and (whenever I tried turning it off to read a story someone linked me to) ads which redirect me to scams.
That’s dynamite.
On my laptop I disable JavaScript everywhere unless it’s important to enable. I would do the same on my phone except the UI makes switching it in and off on a per-site basis much more annoying. The result is my phone battery, which can trivially record GPS traces all day while also managing day-to-day use of augmented reality translation all with negligible battery use, runs out of battery in a few hours of browsing.
That’s cigarettes.
Which site(s) killed the battery?
Ah yes, the famous strategy for solving all problems: Hiding them, because if no one notices them anymore, they are not problems anymore.
If something doesn't impact someone in a way that they can ever tell, it is not a problem to them.
You mean restrict myself to the remaining two websites that don't do this?
Also, it's not like the website obesity crisis is a new concept: http://idlewords.com/talks/website_obesity.htm
No, it shouldn't. Google should reflect an accurate ranking of pages based on content relevance (as best as possible technically), not a curated list.
The evidence that visitors find bloated pages an issue is slowly growing, from Amazon quantising the financial loss of slower loading pages [1], to more recently, Life Hacks taking advantage of GDPR-triggered quicker-loading less-bloated European-versions of news sites [2].
I guess the question worth asking is if a non-AMP page is objectively more-performant than an AMP version, does Google prefer the publisher to keep the slower AMP version?
In a sense AMP is user-focused, validating Jakob Nielsen's prediction of the end of Web Design, because "people spend more time on other sites" [3].
[1] https://www.fastcompany.com/1825005/how-one-second-could-cos... [2] https://lifehacker.com/to-make-websites-load-faster-browse-t... [3] https://www.nngroup.com/articles/end-of-web-design/
Too much to be left to some private interests to play with at their own opaque will (and sell to the highest bidder).
> So we want to move toward a place where web identity is understandable by everyone—they know who they're talking to when they're using a website and they can reason about whether they can trust them. But this will mean big changes in how and when Chrome displays URLs.
There's an IETF proposal for certificate-signed web content (Web Packages) which can be rendered offline. The browser address bar will no longer show the URL of the web server (e.g. Google AMP), it will show the authenticated origin of the Web Package.
2017 IETF proposal by Google: https://tools.ietf.org/html/draft-yasskin-webpackage-use-cas...
Video of a Chrome demo at 2018 AMP event, which looks like the latest Chrome proposal for hiding URLs in favor of “web identity”: https://youtube.com/watch?&t=9m03s&v=pr5cIRruBsc
There may be overlap in goals with W3C Web Publications, which is working to converge EPUB and Web: https://w3c.github.io/wpub/
What happens if your “web identity” certificate expires or is revoked/blacklisted? Does your web identity certificate require a separate yearly fee from the domain name?
Edit: Comments from Chrome dev team manager, https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1037057121961967616 & https://twitter.com/__apf__/status/1037181065423515648
> URLs aren't usable, but people are forced to rely on them for so much -- browsing, security, sharing. Expect to see changes to how Chrome displays identity in the coming year.
When your AMP pages appear in Google's Search results, users aren't visiting your site. They are visiting a restricted shell of your site on google.com with functionality that benefits Google, not the website owner (examples: a back button to google.com, left-right swipes that take users off of your site, restricted monetization options, pages that don't display for 8 seconds if you block potentially-dangerous 3rd party scripts, etc.).
Is there no one left at Google who still believes in an independent, decentralized Web? The open WWW has always been under attack, but to see it fundamentally wrecked by Google is depressing.
The fact that you have to surrender full control of your own site and content to be featured by Google is criminal.
They don't own the web.
They could improve their indexing to handle more of the web, but instead they're trying to shift the cost of indexing to people who publish on the web. The small guy. Not the near trillion dollar company.
The most prominent results should be he most relevant results, not the ones who kiss the most ass
I know the formula is mostly about relevance, but ass kissing shouldn't even be in there
You sure about that?
To me, it looks more like Google has just become emboldened enough to start openly abusing their position to gain control of the web. This has always been Google's way, it's just that they dressed it up in prettier PR speak previously or tried to do it more quietly to keep the "we're not evil" wool pulled over the eyes of most of the population.
They were willing to give RSS/Atom a crippling blow at the launch of Google Plus.
I remember Usenet going downhill immediately after they started pulling it into Google Groups (an unusable discussion platform).
I suspect that it will be the end of the WWW if Google is successful with AMP and the removal of URLs. Something new will have to be created from the ashes, though it may be difficult if Google controls the hardware, software (browser, OS), and potentially the network.
Google is motivated by getting people to click on ads. That's why Google Chrome's URL auto-completion is so bad -- you're supposed to go to Google Search on the way to your destination and click on well-concealed ads. I'm guessing that somewhere in the plan to hide URLs is a scheme to get people to depend more on search (to click on ads) and less on going directly to the destination. With AMP, the search and the destination are both google.com.
Don't get me started on Google Groups... The UI is so bad it looks like an hackathon-level quality...
If anything this has the potential to help further decentralise the web, by allowing users to retrieve content via whatever protocol works best for them, without losing the benefits of URLs.
Normally when you share a document on email it is very intuitive. People realise that it is not live data, and that they can share it with anyone over email. It would be good to have a web package format that could be sent by email and treated like a normal document. But also benefit from server based resources when neccessary.
I'm setting up a static server to deal with hosting analyses purely because there's no current good solution to this and my approach otherwise is "tell people to download then open this html file" which is merely bad for techies but atrocious for non-techies.
I would absolutely love a format I can deliver some HTML + bits of data in that's treated just like any normal document that can be sent around.
How did Google get this bad? Why are we letting the internet devolve back to the early 90s?
If Google doesn't aggressively pursue things which jack up their revenue, they switch from a growth company to a non-growth company sooner rather than later. Instead of a P/E of 52, maybe thats a P/E of 10 or 20. If that happens too soon, then their ability to attract and pay talent diminishes significantly. Thus, "don't be evil" is replaced with the ends justifying the means.
The only big reprieve we have here is that if Google comes up with some wacky new idea which breaks w3c standards and Apple doesn't go along with it, it probably doesn't get adapted.
applause from the crowd
So this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause
What happened to the 'View Source' ethos?!
There are no "Web Identity" certificates. Just standard X.509 certs, like there have always been. As for what happens to Web Packages when they expire, that's also exactly what you'd expect: https://wicg.github.io/webpackage/loading.html#trusting-cert...
> From a user perspective, they want to see...where is this content coming from?
It's interesting because it sounds like he's saying: If the bits are coming from Service Y and not literally "Joe's Closet," we want to show people that this Service Y stuff (like Google's AMP URL for Joe's content) is essentially still Joe's Closet.
I'd be more worried for domain registrars in this case than anything. URLs could indeed stop being so meaningful as a faux-ID, because now Joe has much more flexibility and less concern for this or that domain. URL segments to the right of the domain name will be even more of a back-office concern than they are now.
And the big infrastructure cats like Google, who "own" the methods by which published things are effectively spread to audiences, get to now "own" the content, but only if you look at "own" through the old URL-based lens. That's interesting because after this change, what does "my own digital real estate" mean? It effectively means that I own an identity or group of identities, and now vendors get to compete for rights to carry or express my identity. URLs were similar but this can remove a deceptive that's-a-scam-site-even-though-my-name-is-in-the-URL part and allow in a Google-owned-domain part.
And hopefully there really will be more than one entity that can compete. Right now the scary part is that for example if I'm using AMP to publish news, Google gets to express my "everything ADHD news" by default, because they have so much leverage there. (I did catch myself using !gn a lot this week in DDG...mmmph)
Anyway: Remember when you HAD to have a .com to be taken seriously? Wow, "those were the days" comments incoming in the next 5-10 years if this lands well...
Still, I don't know if it's "good" or "bad" so much as another layer through which to work with connectivity.
> What happens if your “web identity” certificate expires or is revoked/blacklisted? Does your web identity certificate require a separate yearly fee from the domain name?
Or maybe more practically: If you have like 100 different hobbies, is a single identity certificate which becomes associated with one of those hobbies going to jack up your chances of getting "found" in some way for the other hobbies? URLs handle this really well.
Also, think about some pretty-good-case benefits: Your domain name or URL problems will no longer get in the way of your "stamp of quality" identity, assuming your identity is looked at well _by some content consumer or group of content consumers_. You have always been a brand just by having a name and an objectively-sense-able set of properties. Now the subjective question is deepened--the quality of what you produce and represent.
If pseudonyms are permitted, then how will collisions be handled? Aren’t we right back to DNS namespace collisions and years of case law on domain name trademark disputes?
Organizations that paid millions for domain name real estate will object to their assets becoming worthless overnight. Can they sue Google?
I'm guessing this won't really (or doesn't _have to_) impede anonymity so much. Some kind soul will set up the "GeoCities / NeoCities of Online Identity" and from there it's just a question of whether you care how you are perceived while using that particular umbrella. Domain names would be the big losers.
But this is just my brand-new mental model for what's going on...
Let me explain, if you enter facébook.com then on the url bar it will not show that your friends are on this site as well. The exact gui is irrelevant, the point is that it will be easy to tell whether you are on the right website that you are used to navigating to based on the indicator of amounts of friends and who is using and recommending that site. This will also cultivate a certain awareness that if you are navigating outside your usual url space then you will probably be more careful because it doesn't show that any of your friends are on there yet. Banks might offer a service where their bot "befriends" you on socialnetwork XYZ to get that nice little indicator that you are on the right banking website without anybody else actually having to use it. This system might work for any website actually. If there is a concern that this disincentivizes people from using new websites then I think it will be outweighed by several factors like your desire to establish social proof - meaning that you might be more likely to share the new website you found so you can be safer when visiting it next time because you only have to look at the url indicator and see that friend X that you recommended it to has also added this website to their profile.
That wouldn't work in practice. People shouldn't have to share the list of websites they visit with third party entities, and some of us don't use social media. Some people's social media "friends" lists are full of people who they don't know. The future of marketing and phishing would be for bots to befriend unsuspecting people in order to build trust for their sites.
As a marketer I've been fortunate enough to avoid most of the AMP fallout because of the specific makeup of my clientele. However, my colleagues who have to deal with AMP want Google to kill it forever and never bring it back.
Your colleagues are the problem that AMP is unfortunately necessary to solve. There are too many bloated, slow, design-forward and tracker-infested pages that take ten times as much memory and time as is required for the core content to be loaded and presented. This means the core of the user experience in AMP-land is generally much, much better.
It didn't have to be this way. AMP is necessary because the web user experience has become atrocious. There have been many years, flush and bountiful with opportunities to improve this. Most websites remain blessed with this wondrous panoply.
AMP seems to be solving for a problem that doesn't seem to exist anymore. Data is absurdly cheap now. And wi-fi is never hard to find
I've lost count of the number of times a page has unnecessarily been rendered unusable because although it had loaded all of the important stuff, it was waiting around for a web font or JavaScript to finish loading and I was going through an area with poor signal.
That's in a developed country with solid, ubiquitous telecoms infrastructure. Most of the world – and most of the people in the world – don't have it as good, so it matters even more for them.
Broadband access has improved drastically as well in the last one year. I've gone from paying $40/month for a 16mbps connection with a data cap of 80GB to $12/month for a 50mbps connection with no data cap.
It's come to a point where I don't think at all about data usage or my phone bill.
Which is why I say that AMP is a solution in the wrong direction. If India can make data so cheap, it's only a matter of time before other markets follow suit. AMP is a solution to a dying problem, not an emerging one.
Hard to imagine how it could get this bad.
Even if you do find wifi, it's often slow or totally broken. It usually requires you to log in and be tracked. Often the wifi network operator knows every place you visit when they have a network located there, even if you don't deliberately log in at those locations.
Success often hinges on making something people want. Marketing done well is hugely helpful in determining both what people want and whether they perceive a product as a solution to their problems, and it can help guide product development with marketing analytics and other user data. I don't think I'd ever have been successful without a marketing background.
To take it back to the original point, I will never move to AMP. I spend a lot of time speeding up my pages through simplification, caching, and any other trick that makes sense (deferment, lazy loading, minification, combining, etc.) But there are a lot of reasons to not want your link to start with amp.google.com when someone shares my page.
* Any links to that URL rely on the good graces of the search engines to "count" for rankings and continue sending traffic. This is especially worrying if I decide to change standards. Will my rankings tank? Will the crawlers get totally confused and think I have a bunch of 404s? Both have been reported. These are not risks I'm willing to take with my sites that took so much work to build and promote.
* When someone shares my page I want my URL to be clear - not some google.com URL. That's both confusing for the user and bad for building a brand. Even if it was a cname to my own subdomain I'd feel better, e.g. amp.mysite.com
* Aside from the reason above, the lock-in is philosophically problematic. I intentionally use cross-platform apps on my phone because I don't want to be locked into an ecosystem. I don't foresee switching to Apple, but I didn't foresee switching to Android either. The point is that I could. This freedom is important to me.
* I don't trust that Google is committed to me and my content. Just look at the YouTubers getting screwed over by Google's lazy copyright policy. What makes you think they're going to suddenly staff up and/or care more on web content?
Anyway, as a writer, marketer, business owner, and web developer: fuck AMP.
This * million. The only thing I can reliably trust google is that when I type a search query, results will be meaningful.
Regarding them keeping my data secure, not selling out to NSA, dropping support for things on a whim, kicking users out of their platform, I can’t really trust them.
Google or anyone else.
It’s just not their core business. They don’t really make much money from AMP. It feels like some VP’s pet project to get a big fat stock bonus.
If you run a serious business. Stay the hell away from AMP.
Even that is pretty dicey these days. Search for `keyword1 keyword2 obscure_but_important_keyword3` and `obscure_but_important_keyword3` will just get dropped from your query.
> Regarding them keeping my data secure [...] I can’t really trust them.
Really? I trust Google more than pretty much any other company to keep my emails secure, for example. Very curious what companies you would consider trustworthy from a security standpoint, unless by security you misspoke and really meant privacy.
Even this is getting less reliable, image search at least.
Reverse image search (from what I can gather from using it) used to try and match the image to existing images it knew, then tried to tell you where it came from and what it was based on data it gathered from the page it came from.
Today it appears to use a machine learning to decide what the image is, then show similar images of the same object with the same visual appearance.
The difference to the end user is before if you searched using a still of a film it would almost always successfully identify it and provide links related to the film and the location of the still in particular.
Today if you do the same then Google will identify the picture has a woman in it using ML and return a search for the word "woman" with just random stock photos of women in similar images then the search listings will just be links to Pintrest boards containing the searched image.
I don't think this is the real root issue you're thinking of. I don't believe HN has a simplistic view of marketers (to contrast, I'd say it seems to have a simplistic view of management). Many people here, myself included, would never deny that the job of marketer is difficult, challenging, and has a lot of depth. The issue we have is with the job itself.
> Success often hinges on making something people want. Marketing done well is hugely helpful in determining both what people want and whether they perceive a product as a solution to their problems, and it can help guide product development with marketing analytics and other user data. I don't think I'd ever have been successful without a marketing background.
This is perfect. This is exactly what marketing should be! Problem is, it's rarely it.
The marketing as we usually encounter it, on the receiving end, isn't about "making something people want". It's about "making people want something". This simple transposition of words is the point at which marketing turns from objectively valuable into malicious and exploitative, and ultimately the source of hate against the whole field.
You wrote that marketing done well "is hugely helpful in determining both what people want and whether they perceive a product as a solution to their problems, and it can help guide product development with marketing analytics and other user data". Yeah, sure. Except it's motte-and-bailey again, because we all know that's not what's going on. The data isn't used to optimize the product to deliver better value, it's used to optimize the product to trick the buyer into purchase. And analytics aren't just guiding product development (in either direction), they're also resold on the side, so that someone else can better trick the buyer into purchasing something else they don't need.
The social contract between the individual and the firm is: the individual gives the firm money, in exchange for the firm delivering value. Marketing, as implemented in practice, is the art of maximizing the money received while minimizing the value given back (because value costs money to make). Hence the hate.
Also products are definitely getting better all the time. Feedback is a part of marketing and personalization to predict consumer needs is the next wave. Tricking users is not a viable business model for any legitimate company.
Follow-up question: Do you think the impact of marketers on people’s lives globally is net positive, or net negative?
Do you need them to just announce to the world that your product exists and solves a particular set of problems? Or do you need them to break through the noise caused by all the other marketers? ;).
It's a self-sustaining industry. If you squint, it's basically rent-seeking.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-year_plans_for_the_nation...
You can't buy a product/service you don't know exists.
Actually, it is. What do you believe is the purpose of ads? More importantly, how do you interpret the fact that any product release is based on an advertisement campaign?
Product discovery should involve me consciously, purposefully looking for a product, not all possible products trying to come to me all the time.
How do you win your first few mouths?
> I could walk around the shop and discover a new product on the shelves.
What is the shop owner incentive to promote your product this way before he can be sure that he will sell some of your stuff.
> Or, pick up a catalog with local companies.
Your local car manufacturer?
> pick up a magazine dedicated to companies announcing their products in particular domain.
Without ads, how would those magazines be monetized?
> Or these days, Google for a solution to a particular problem.
SEO = Marketing
Family, friends, people living in the neighbourhood of your business. If it's any good, it'll spread. If it isn't, it doesn't deserve to spread.
> What is the shop owner incentive to promote your product this way before he can be sure that he will sell some of your stuff.
It can be either way for the shop owner; your product might turn out to be a flop, or an overnight success. Stocking shelves is an active process, an exploraition vs. exploitation problem.
> Your local car manufacturer?
Word of mouth. Regular (i.e. not rich) people don't buy cars off adverts, they buy off experiences of other car owners. This works well enough in practice already.
> Without ads, how would those magazines be monetized?
Companies would pay to be put in them, obviously. Also, without ads being prevalent everywhere, people might even be inclined to buy them. The difference is, it would be people who choose when they see ads, not the advertisers.
> SEO = Marketing
SEO == fucking up the Internet by greedily exploiting imperfections of search engine ranking algorithms. It is indeed marketing, and something I'd love to see disappear. I hate SEO, and have been on the receiving end of SEO practices (i.e. blogspam) in the past.
It’s a pure negative.
Not all marketers sell snakeoil and used cars, you know
Marketers are the single most destructive force impacting the lives of anyone using the internet nowadays, whether from attacks on privacy to manipulating democratic elections.
I really expect more nuanced comments than this on HN.
There are categories of company. Yours has a dedicated team taking care of cluster, even has enough resource to make it k8s-as-a-service. Whatever hype rarely affects companies that have resources (money, human, time etc.)
But hype doesn't choose companies, it spreads and kills approaches that are more proper than k8s to a lot of companies. I'd love to see how many SMEs even need servers clustering.
Edit: Removed "Is it different than advertising?"
Even with advertising alone there is 1) buying it, 2) concepting the brand message 3) writing the specific content 4) creating how it looks 5) creating the material and 6) Placing it 7) project managing the process 8) analysing the results - all as separate fields.
And within above people can specialise in specific categories like online, above the line (e.g. billboards), below the line offline (e.g. snail mail), TV, sponsorship etc
And that's just getting ads live....
I googled 'types of marketing jobs' and read about 5 articles and they all have different guides about what makes marketing roles and none seems to cover it.... One article put sales in marketing which is a common misunderstanding of what marketing is, and several times I've seen companies put top sales management in charge of marketing because 'they can sell' which does not work as its a surprising different skill set.
But here's a couple of articles to cover the common areas;
https://www.localwise.com/a/313-21-types-of-marketing-jobs-t...
https://marketingwit.com/types-of-marketing-jobs
Or you could go with the sometimes tech view... the guys that play with crayons and waste money :)
What is "the line"?
> Below the line (BTL) advertising is more one to one, and involves the distribution of pamphlets, handbills, stickers, promotions, brochures placed at point of sale, on the roads through banners and placards. It could also involve product demos and samplings at busy places like malls and market places or residential complexes.
http://www.theadvertisingclub.net/index.php/features/editori...
https://muddlesintomaxims.com/2016/02/27/verbing-weirds-lang...
A marketer would find your marketable database of potential customers, work on messaging that appeals to the needs of the different audience types, find ways to target these audiences through channels like email, search marketing, content/SEO, social, etc., allocate budget broadly to test the different channels, and then turn dials accordingly dependent on where marketing budget has the best return.
The daily tasks of this can be anything from producing new marketing collateral, testing new channel tactics, adjusting lead flow and lead distribution to a sales team, managing agency support, cozying up with PMs/engineers to get product features added, calm a sales manager who is pissy about why leads aren't flowing or being properly distributed, etc.
It's a kind of wealth distribution, nothing more.
I've had jobs in the past where I've been paid more for doing less. I've also experienced the exact reverse. I think a lot of people are in denial because they haven't had the life experience where they can say the same?
If this is truly how you feel, why not try to add value for your clients instead of just taking the money and not contributing? I work in digital marketing and what I do, among other things involves:
- conducting split testing experiments to evaluate which types of marketing copy or site UX lead to better conversion
- evaluating client's web properties to improve SEO, things like semantic content layout, redirect types (301 v 302 etc), accessibility, logical information architecture
- writing code for custom event tracking, implementing schema-based markup for better search engine discoverability
- creating outreach campaigns via email, social and paid search channels, each of which requires has its own KPIs and require a fair amount of domain knowledge to implement and measure effectively
- analyzing search trend data to figure out if the product copy language is similar to what users are searching for
For your original question, the difference between this and advertising is an advertiser receives a brief and builds creatives appropriate to whatever channels they and the marketer choose.
This is my experience and a few marketers have disagreed with this - obviously it varies between companies.
Advertising - digital, physical
Analytics - web traffic, roi analysis, data-mining, segmentation etc
Brand marketing - ads, identity / messaging, etc
Content - creating new content for the business around product/service to support promotional activity
Email - "subscribe to my newsletter", but at enterprise scale and managing content for the millions of subscribers you have
Product marketing - often a function in large enterprises, may be involved with things like messaging within a product
Web - website, seo, design, architecture, UX etc all fall under marketing
There's also a lot of functions that support many of these marketing roles, like the tech that powers all this, keeping things working smoothly, including integrations, compliance with stuff like GDPR, CASL etc
I've worked in large companies with 20+ person Marketing/PR departments and I'm not actually sure what their day to day job entails, and would totally be curious to know more. It's a major part of society these days, whether we love it or hate it. We all know IT has phone support roles, application development, system admins, project managers, etc... but I couldn't really tell you what all the different roles are in marketing.
And I predict that future technologies will democratize the ability to 3D-print hardware to be used with open-source networking and web software to connect to each other in ways that don't depend on single web companies like Google in order for it to be cheap and nice to use.
Think about this: no consumers care whether Google succeeds or not - people just want the web services that they want. Google could easily fade away and be supplanted by another entity in ten years' time if something sufficiently innovative and disruptive arrives on the scene.
Google has enough services that even if google searching became obsolete, they could fall back on their other services that are currently free like email and docs.
Apple isnt quite like this. A bad/boring iphone=end of Apple.
How do you know that? There are very few people in the world who can claim that with evidence.
- Miami herald rolls their own amp pages: http://amp.miamiherald.com/news/business/article135187364.ht...
- Here's the icon in search for the same page: https://i.imgur.com/43Hk7tV.png
From what I understand, google bots detect the amp standard and flag it with the amp tag for mobile search results.
Reply to sibling: Why would anyone call an email provider a walled garden, especially if using your own domain name?!
Single person websites wont be able to compete.
This means 'for profit' websites rather than free blogs take priority.
This sounds like how Facebook killed their brand.
It has been a net negative for usability in my book.
I also have all amp-related addresses blocked in my host file, which is probably less feasible on mobile.
Putting aside the Google bits, is there a case against building within the AMP HTML and JS spec? Or is the case against all down to Google's ownership of the project?
On my iPhone AMP is frustratingly buggy: rotation doesn't work properly, the URL bar doesn't disappear on scroll, Reader mode works inconsistently, etc. But these seem like issues with Google's cache and hosting, not the spec.
Google are now making new standards which don't conform to the agreed standard, which restrict how you can build your site. If you don't do it, they'll destroy your traffic.
AMP is text book Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. No ad network but the Google ad network allowed.
We're sleep walking back into the same thing MS did 30 years ago, with Google this time. They really have just lived long enough to become the villain.
Are you talking hypothetically? Because right now...
This is not true.
https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-ad#...
What are you talking about? What standards? Most content websites are a combination of incompetence and active hostility to the user. The less control publishers have, the better.
If this "your traffic" is traffic from Google to your website, it isn't "your" traffic, it's Google's. If that traffic from Google is important to you, then it's in your best interests to work with Google's requirements.
People throwing this line out has ruined the dark knight for me.
Anyway, you're exactly right. It's textbook EEE.
Their behaviour with Android is also pretty bad.
and their security disclosure policy.
I already have a javascript spec; it's called ECMAscript. (still wish I could back in time and stop whatever fool decided to shove "java" into the name)
> Putting aside the Google bits, is there a case against building within the AMP HTML and JS spec? Or is the case against all down to Google's ownership of the project?
It's all down to how Google treats AMP pages in their SERPs. They only feature the ones in the Google cache.
Imagine if Google put sites hosted at GCE on the first page of results, and moved any site hosted by AWS or Azure to the 2nd page of results. Think anyone would get mad about that?
Why should it be remotely OK for them to use AMP to do the same thing?
That is why it is reasonable to promote AMP results. They load instantly instead of merely quickly.
Yes, you shouldn't need javascript for basic functionality like images.
That sounds like an optimisation that should be implemented by the browser, not the webpage.
But the likelihood of that happening seems... low.
Is google the worst company around when it comes to this sort of almost faux open source?
Fast, lightweight websites are great - it's just that AMP is completely unnecessary to achieve that goal and instead serves as a way pretense to keep users and content within the Google eco system. Google could just as well rank sites on how fast and optimized they are, regardless of AMP usage, and I'm sure we would see a race to remove the bloat the web is currently plagued by.
https://www.ampproject.org/about/amp-design-principles/
No whitelists.
We won’t give any special treatment to specific sites, domains or origins except where needed for security or performance reasons.
Even if it were proposed in good faith, the power it gives google is too dangerous.
My main issue is that Google hosts your site and tracks all of your visitors directly, whereas you never (directly) see any of those visits. This of course depends on your definition of "ownership of the project" and whether that extends to "ownership of your site and its visitors".
> these seem like issues with Google's cache and hosting, not the spec.
Based on your brief description, these don't sound like they could be issues with the cache or hosting; rather they sound like they're likely with Google's JS implementations of AMP JS libraries.
Sounds like your problem is specifically with Google's cache. Anyone can host an AMP cache. If you afraid of them tracking visitors, you're free to pay for your own hosting and host your own cache, instead of using their free one.
For Google Search (probably the primary link source on at least the anglophone web), Google hosts your content and tracks your visitors.
But now...
Searching news on Google is a bad experience. AMP has made it even worse.
There’s room in search.
> Until now, AMP-enabled links were only accessible through the likes of Google, Twitter, Bing News, and Facebook. Cloudflare’s Accelerated Mobile Links democratizes the power of AMP for free across all Cloudflare plans.
Now, don't get me wrong, Google is thinking primarily for their own benefit here and this is one of those cases in which the end doesn't justify the means, but is a simpler web that much of a bad thing?
I couldn't pay a parking ticket I got a few days ago because I needed to download a half gigabye app to pay it, and my $250 phone from three years ago wasn't new enough. And they developed the app first, and there was no fallback to just HTML. My only choice was to go to the station and pay. What if I couldn't afford to travel to pay my ticket in person and couldn't afford a phone made in the last 18 months?
And yes, certificates will be politicized. If you displease them, they can have every device in the world block your server.
Of course, soon, Firefox will just be a re-branded Chromium, because of course Mozilla's brand is the only asset it has, as we all know that if Mozilla can't make Firefox keep up with the impossible standards that Google sets for us, then it is worthless. If Firefox can't implement the latest polyfills or DRM garbage that Google decided on, then it should be thrown out and we should just accept our new overlords.
Use any technology in a non-standard way, and it quickly becomes clear how bad things are. The rot is even more visible in developing countries.
This is hegemony. Not exaggerating.
unless it was from the actual government, your other choice was not to bother.
Stop trying to enforce unnatural and irrational changes just for gaining protagonism on something you DON'T DESERVE and shouldn't even mess about.
It's already annoying having to load your analytics present in almost every modern website, despise the fact that most of the world don't even know about the existence of this, neither agreed with(cannot choose to block something you don't even know about).
Are you thinking it's overreaction? wait for tomorrow. Keep underestimating what they are doing.
In a way I like AMP, as it restores the simplicity of the web, and I wish that would've happened without Google making it necessary (to rank well).
Here's hoping marketers learn to market outside of Google and Facebook, and the web is made simple again.
Personally I could care less about "speed improvements." If the site loads slow I'll juat skip it. Amp existing to help that happen less doesn't really affect me. I probably waste too much time surfing anyway; maybe I WANT to filter slow websites on my own (by ending my search/session).
Eh easy now, they will fix that for soon /s
https://www.businessinsider.com/google-chrome-url-replacemen...
The current choice for google when someone searches for a news story is between linking them to a page that is (a) in an ecosystem under google's control and (b) will load reasonably fast and get fairly straight to the article content, or (a') is completely up to the publisher and (b') may contain any number of redirects, external scripts, full-page ads, pop-ups and overlays, autoplaying sound+video etc.
If we had a system that offers (a') + (b), it would blow everything else out of the water. At the moment we just have to pick the least bad option. AMP is obviously aligned to google's business interests, but if you A/B tested the user experience of the AMP and non-AMP versions of many of the news sites out there on mobile, I think you'd see a preference for AMP because the publisher can do less of the stuff aligned with their own business interests.
EDIT: I realise that AMP can break many navigation features, but for the "click a link - read a single article - leave again" use case it beats getting interrupted by an "other articles you may enjoy, and by the way sign up to our newsletter!" pop-up halfway through.
I completely agree with you that their monopoly dream is bad - their motto "don't be evil" is starting to sound as ironic as the word "democratic" in some countries' names - but many of the advertising and data-sharing practices on the "open" web are also bad (and sometimes illegal under the GDPR).
Choose your poison.
Do those restrictions[1] result in a browsing experience with
1. significantly less resource usage/battery drain?
2. less distraction?
3. less of my user data flying off to who knows where?
[1] https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-ifr...
Long story short: you can achieve similar performance and UX without resorting to adopting a proprietary standard.
> All the articles published on Google’s developer website are intended to ensure the chaotic, messy web becomes more like a clean, easy-to-understand web.
> AMP pages are fast to load (so fast to crawl), easy to understand (thanks to mandatory structured data), and devoid of any unwanted clutter or mess (as that breaks the standard).
> An AMPified web makes Google’s life so much easier. They would no longer struggle to crawl and index websites, they would require significantly less effort to extract meaningful content from webpages, and would enable them to rank the best possible pages in any given search result.
> The Google AMP Cache will serve AMP pages instead of a website’s own hosting environment, and also allow Google to perform their own optimisations to further enhance user experience.
> No more rogue ad networks, no more malicious ads, all monetisation approved and regulated by Google.
There are plenty of things to complain about with AMP. But, it also does address some very real problems. These are some admittedly cherry picked quotes - but, the article seems to make that point as well, even if it disagrees with Google's approach. What I'd love to hear about is a different approach to address these issues - and not something handwavy about how it could be done in a weekend. Actual code.
I used to host my website using WordPress with a lot of plugins. It was incredibly slow and unreliable. Eventually I decided to replace it with my own custom solution developed from scratch. We had blog, forum and payments on the website. It took just a couple of months of evenings and weekend work to complete the project. I'm very happy with the result [1]. It works 10x to 100x faster and it's much more flexible. My point is that people shouldn't be afraid of replacing their existing bloated system with something new and better. I was afraid that it would be impossible to replicate WordPress and plugins functionality that I needed, or it would take too much time and effort, but I was wrong. I'm glad I made the move.
Nicely done!
That's kinda a lot of work. I'm not sure if you are saying that everyone should do the same - that doesn't sound realistic.
The site does load fast and look great, though!
You can generally revise an AMP URL to make it normal.
The problem is people getting comfortable with Google and depend on Google too much. In the end, Google is in a position to force decisions on everyone.
If you are not happy with the way Google is doing things, stop using Google products and develop or use alternatives.
Because theoretically the damn thing should work - Google's QUIC protocol is often the only protocol my shitty internet can support. It's wonderful.
Shouldn't AMP be using QUIC, does it? If it does - then there is something seriously wrong with the cache/prefetch algorithm in the AMP CDN. Because sometimes cold pages refuse to load!
This video is hilarious. Applause for a slight cosmetic change to a URL that basically amounts to a subdomain?
How do people at Google find such work fulfilling? If I was given such a meaningless project I'd be depressed. It seems that at a certain point such large companies run out of real work to do, and insist on making such changes that don't really matter anymore just to create work for people to do and present on stage.
This is going against everything that the web stands for. I assume the next logical step in this line of thinking is for Google to require developers to start making pull requests to Chrome when we want to change the style of the text on one of our pages?
It seems like what could have happened at Google is they are fed up with web sites draining the battery on their precious Android devices and want so desperately to beat Apple in the battery life game they are willing to neuter the web in order to do it.
This is exactly what happens when you hire an aggressive queen and don't have any checks and balances in your behemoth tech company that is becoming more and more accustomed to her dark soul.
That... does not make any sense. If anything, it will increase the relative lead of Apple in the battery life game.
It's about not having information being more and more stuck in Apple News / FB because those silos are more efficient than the web. If people use apps instead of the web, Google will earn less money.
In my experience, AMP pages are leaps and bounds better than the full-fat experience. There's far less tracking, far fewer ads, and less asynchronously loaded core content. All of these mean that the page loads much faster and is a generally better experience.
I think it's just genius.
To me, this sounds like antitrust, not net neutrality.
I guess PWA + AMP = PWAMP is not really a thing?
edit: and of course pwamp.com is taken.
All the content, even the advertisements will have to be built as Reddit posts.
Edit: I posted 1 comment in the last 2 days on HN and now try to post a link and I get this error: "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks." please 1 upvote and I might be able to share an interesting story... LOL... the mods here would make a carnage if they were in a real power position. Thanks Dang...
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