We disabled Google AMP at Tribune Publishing
kurtgessler.medium.com
kurtgessler.medium.com
If I remember correctly pageviews didn't increase when we used it, which was the idea as google would rank us higher.
... but we'll still have nice-looking hair :)
In my experience if a publisher chooses to make their main website a trash fire, their AMP version is too.
Nothing stopping a publisher doing their website right. Even with advertising: manage inventory first-party, don't track users off-site, base your ads on content.
To the publisher? Originally, some twisted incentive that you'd rank higher on mobile and then globally but IIRC this no longer exists and OG data is also used. AMP is a component library too now so I guess that could simplify development if they couldn't use anything else, because HTML is so hard.
To Google? A funnel away from in-house and management at larger publishers, and ideally into one of their AMP-supported models. AML is "open" now but it's still Google, innit.
There seems to be a huge gap between what ad buyers pay, and what publishers receive (one study showed The Guardian got as little at 10c for each $ spent) so publishers end up adding nore ads to try to compensate
https://advertising.theguardian.com/
They may well use backup agencies for selling unfilled slots.
Says in the worst cases they only saw 30% of the revenue
Recent studies have shown even worse results for other publishers https://whatsnewinpublishing.com/how-much-publisher-revenue-...
I don't know their business, but I suspect most of their big money ads are direct sales and they pocket the lot. It'd be interesting to break down their income by source.
And this is not a swipe. This really does need a citation. It's believable, but only just.
Do you think that journalists just work for free?
Can you please edit swipes out of your comments to HN? We're trying for a different sort of forum here, as described at https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
Regardless though, the most-critical local reporting I know of is funded without advertisement or paywalls. Both newsroom and freelance journalism funding happens through grants. Funny enough, the orgs that I'm never able to get freelance work through are orgs that have paywalls and significant ads. Lots of gatekeeping when you have advertisers to appease.
The user suffer more when the content goes away.
You could even make it $100/month if you wanted.
Sounds like advertising meets that description.
It's a transaction of value - potential future customers via the service of advertising.
Instead of addressing that you introduced a third party, which works for the website as a service. Correct, but irrelevant.
Advertising is a service, it is fundamentally no different than any other service. We may find it annoying or distasteful, but it is a natural good from natural actors in a capitalist system.
You're looking at the wrong thing as capital and the wrong thing as the service.
The service is customer sourcing and the capital is literally capital.
It is a very natural capitalist creation, self-evidently so.
The platforms are acting like feudal landlords, not capitalists.
Second, the market has spoken. Some of us feel we're being exploited by having our data harvested for the transaction of advertising, but most do not.
> Some of us feel we're being exploited by having our data harvested for the transaction of advertising, but most do not.
Since FB and Google have monopolies in ppc marketing, I'm not sure how you'd reach this conclusion. The only way to opt out is to completely block them on your networks, there is no competing option.
It's both. Why would you think these are mutually exclusive?
And AMP is a downside for everyone, i think we can agree on that. Seems like content creators didnt even get any of the promised benefits out of it.
Wait, what? At the time it was introduced, it was literally the only counterbalance to the incentives of adding as many ads to your site as possible. Google has better ways of penalizing bad practices now, but that wasn't the case 7 years ago.
NPR used to do something similar for GDPR — either accept their cookies or view the site content in plain text.
(edit: probably not in line with GDPR but heyho)
Obviously, if you visit a news article and select to be redirected to plaintext, they don't redirect you to that article on the plaintext page for that article, but to the homepage, which makes it inconvenient in the hopes you won't select that option again. But once you see where to insert the article ID, it's good.
But with AMP, Google's promise mutated into something which had no exchange in value: Google said, "We'll serve your content, we'll make it fast. You don't even need to sustain the traffic, we'll do that for you. It's the ultimate fast."
But then, Google turned around and cost-extracted that same market into semi-permanent chaos. This promise to users ("we both win when the web is fast") was borrowed and manipulated to Google's benefit and the publisher's detriment, and, in essence, became, "look at me; I am the [publisher] now. Here are your GA stats for the traffic we decided to send you today for your content."
I'm not even sure as a user that I care about AMP. So what, articles were faster for awhile. You could have accomplished the same thing for almost no money with a desktop version of Google Reader, but here we are.
What other alternatives are there? The Gemini project seems too barebones and requires its own browser.
Correctly design your website.
Website obesity is a human problem, not a technical one. If asm.js solved a technical problem, AMP is basically just a very strict and unavoidable linter.
1. Fantastic content. If you have that pretty much nothing else matters.
2. Hand-tuned CSS and HTML
I've done this on many personal websites and it is a easy brainless way to get a fast simple site.
The way I see it, Google just need to penalise bloated websites far more harshly. There's no real technical challenge here - we already have fast browsers. The challenge is one of incentives.
I personally use the Amplosion plug-in for Safari on iOS which nukes AMP pages from orbit transparently, substituting their standard variant. [1]
"AMP will no longer be necessary for stories to be featured in Top Stories on mobile; it will be open to any page"
But they didn't announce anything about retiring it. It's still there if you want it for some other reason.
https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/crime/bs-md-ci-cr-timothy-...
Interstitial pay walls, auto playing video ads that are pinned to the top, useless read more button, horrible tabula ads. It’s a total mess.
Google was telling from the start that AMP was only a temporary solution, and that the end-goal of AMP is to disappear.
* Nothing says 'temporary' more than introducing a tech to a form of communication which is expected to remain readable basically forever.
This article is about dumping AMP - discuss! I found the medium article extremely well written with loads of stats to back up assertions. It is also mercifully short. That is exactly what I want to see.
For me AMP is an example of "insidious" - it looks shiny ("my precious") but it will suck the life out of you eventually. AMP, fundamentally puts your content distribution in the hands of a third party (G) that can change it at will and that breaks the promise of the web and ensures that you will have your testes tickled at first and then twisted off.
AMP is not simply a CDN - it doesn't simply regurgitate your stuff faster. It changes it and does things to it and also gathers as much data as it wishes, from your customers. My Precious ...
Oh look: I've managed to conflate some fictional seriously damaged goods from Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings with what Google will do to you.
Silly me.
...and that's the one thing AMP did right: it empowered developers to push back against the garbage by giving them a big ol' "Google says no" sign to wave around. Which is all kinds of problematic in terms of existential threats to the Open Web, but it did clean up that specific type of garbage.
How do we give anti-garbage folks that same power in a post-AMP world, without resorting to centralized authority?
They could have easily made the spec just "here's the subset of crap you can use, and here's the extra rules" and left it at that, but they just had to add all of the other nonsense to give themselves control. Without that it would have been fine.
They could have still added in the part where they give pagerank bonuses to sites that comply, so there'd be an enforcement mechanism too.
No one won here except some people with an axe to grind and actual web users.
Hopefully web vitals can be a similar forcing function for dev teams with managers, leading to better quality for users.
I presume to some extent AMP was intended to be like Google Fiber. That is a kick in the pants to get others to up their game. It didn't work out that way.
The truth is too many sites are done with an all-about-the-brand mindest. And users are a distant second in the priority list. I'm not sure what the answer is. Sure, obviously, it's not AMP. But we still need something. Users - which is all of us - are being abused.
It was just another power grab, and publishers went with it because AMP sites were given priority in the SERPs.
Anyway, this has been talked about in many threads over 100's of comments.
It's not that simple. If the slow sites have better content and/or Google's customers (i.e., the people searching) expect those sites then Google has to deliver, or at least try. Keep in mind, it's also possible those slow site were spending ad money. Like it or not, Google can't intentionally piss them off.
I'm not saying AMP was an ideal solution. Only that it was smarter than nothing. Nothing wasn't an option.
They also broke scrolling for years and since the desktop experience was poor you had to deal with a hokey non-standard sharing widget.
The article doesn't state how the graphs are produced. I hope they are stacked rather than plain lines, otherwise the comment that people transitioned to normal mobile access is wrong and those visits just vanished.