47 ms·

The Why and How of Google AMP at Condé Nast

104 points by taveras 9y ago

SquareWheel 9y ago
Wow, 36% of traffic seems pretty high. That's a huge chunk of mobile (79% apparently), with an almost doubled click-through rate. As much as HN loves to bicker about Amp, in this case it was clearly a net positive.
- ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
  Of course it is net positive for the early adopters. Google gives preference to its AMP publishers and its search engine. Once we all switch over in pursuance of the huge gains, the benefits will disappear because the AMP will just be the new cost of entry. And what freedoms will be lost when we are all required to run AMP website?
  - recursive 9y ago
    At that point, all the benefits will be reaped by end users. I'm ok with this.
    - throwaway2048 9y ago
      so there is nothing in it for Google?
      - recursive 9y ago
        Oh yeah, good point. There's probably something for them too.
  - s17n 9y ago
    Fewer than if we are all required to run Facebook pages.
- mrexroad 9y ago
  “click through rate from Google search went from 5.9% (Regular) to 10.3% (AMP), and average search position went from 5.9 (Regular) to 1.7 (AMP).” So ranking #2 in search results on average correlated with an increase in click through rate. Oh, btw, just happens that you gotta use AMP to get the SERP gain.
  - donohoe 9y ago
    Well, bear in mind the "carousel" of AMP articles that Google shows on results pages. This is where the lift is coming from.
- niftich 9y ago
  Sure, they want their content to be read, to be "discoverable by the largest possible audience". Meanwhile, "monetization benefits are less decisive and pending further analysis of our current implementation." Publishers find a number of benefits to AMP -- revealed frankly in the article -- but the only reason they use it in the first place is because Google is where a lot of those eyeballs originate anyway. If Some Obscure Search Engine with ~1% marketshare reworked their mobile page to prioritize pages that adhere to some criteria of limitations, used an iframe to frame the content so that it loads inside their page, and threw in a free CDN to sweeten the deal, who'd retool their publishing infrastructure -- as excellently detailed in this post -- to publish in this format? AMP enables an alliance of convenience between one of the top sources of traffic (Google), and the authors of long-form textual content reliant on advertising revenue. To the AMP team's credit, it does so by aligning closer than its competitors to how the web actually works, despite the Google-Search-on-Mobile page then acting as a captive newsreader. Most user criticism of AMP is focused on Google-Search-on-Mobile stealth-morphing into a captive newsreader, while most publisher criticism of AMP is from sites outside of its target market trying out the tech and alarmed at the lack of traffic reaching their server, forgetting that offloading traffic at high volumes is a good thing. AMP isn't for people who are upset that Google is stealing your content; it's for publishers who want Google to expose their content to wide audience and hope to generate revenue through means that correlate to that reach.
  - s17n 9y ago
    I think most of the criticism of AMP is the URLs being messed up, which is something that will soon be fixed.
    - tyingq 9y ago
      I don't imagine most publishers would normally place a banner at the top of the page that someone else controls. With an [x] button that closes your page and goes back to that "someone else".
    - donohoe 9y ago
      No. This will not be fixed. As long as they insist on using their CDN then this cannot be avoided.
- ocdtrekkie 9y ago
  This article doesn't address any of the reasons people have issues with AMP. All it confirms is what we already know: That Google gives preferential treatment to sites which use their products and services. And, like many engineering blogs about employing Google products, seems like it might've been suggested by a Google marketing team.
  - donohoe 9y ago
    No, in most companies the engineers do not write posts because someone from another company reaches out to the marketing team at that company.... developers don't like that and besides, Oscar is a good guy.
    - oscrperez 9y ago
      For real... Tnx!
  - oscrperez 9y ago
    This post is not meant to be a critical piece addressing the issues people have with AMP. That's not the goal here. The goal is to show the reason why we serve AMP content and the tech behind it. There's a lot of conspiracy theories and misunderstanding about how AMP works in the community. AMP is by no means perfect, but its dangers are greatly exaggerated. If you don't trust Google's CDN, no one is forcing you to use Google. The benefits for non-tech users (e.g. my cousin in a 3rd world country with a 2G connection) are there and are clear.
    - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
      Actually, Google is forcing you to use Google. Because your search rankings are dependent on Google getting to cache your content on Google's CDN. There is no situation where you can have your content only cached on someone else's CDN, and get all of the borderline illegal perks of Google favoring content stored on their servers.
- tyingq 9y ago
  Moving to AMP puts them in the carousel, so yes, they got more traffic (at lower revenues per visit). Others will move to AMP, then the traffic will wane. Then Google will make their next move. This is exactly how Froogle/Google product search went.
- donohoe 9y ago
  Yes and no. You can imagine that some of this is new traffic they otherwise would not have gotten and another % is cannibalizing existing traffic they usually get via Google. >> in this case it was clearly a net positive Not so fast. When I was there, the earlier experiment was that its was a "mixed" success. This post also suggests strongly to me that that hasn't changed too much ("Monetization benefits are less decisive and pending further analysis"). For many publishers it comes down to they cant get slightly more traffic with AMP (because of the AMP carousel in Search results) at a lower CPM which is a positive. However, as more publishers come on board that gets tricky all over again and risk of it becoming another race to the bottom of lower CPMs.
deleted 9y ago
[deleted]
taytus 9y ago
Google AMP has a lot of success stories: https://www.ampproject.org/case-studies/ https://www.ampproject.org/case-studies/
zackbloom 9y ago
FYI if you're interested in AMP but don't want to be served from a google.com domain, Cloudflare also has a compatible implementation: https://www.cloudflare.com/website-optimization/accelerated-mobile-links/ https://www.cloudflare.com/website-optimization/accelerated-...
- wmf 9y ago
  This doesn't do what you think. Google search always uses the Google AMP viewer and the Google AMP cache; there's no way to make it use Cloudflare.
yakz 9y ago
As an end-user, AMP breaks 'back' on my iPhone when I navigate to articles (including those from Condé Nast) linked to from Google News. I have to scroll up and use Google's custom back button; using left/right swipe gestures or the browser's back causes problems. Sometimes it's so bad that when I reload the page, I get some weird error from Google about how I got there, which is doubly weird because it's their fault I'm there because they're intentionally wrapping/breaking standard functionality.
- kllrnohj 9y ago
  Browser back button works fine in chrome on a Android with amp pages fwiw. Does safari mobile not support the session history management APIs? caniuse says it does, but it sounds like it doesn't work from what you're saying.
  - callalex 9y ago
    And ActiveX worked fine with Internet Explorer on Windows. We look back and consider that a bad thing for the web, how is this different?
    - kllrnohj 9y ago
      Session history management APIs are a W3C standard supported by all major browsers. This is nothing like activex.
      - oneweekwonder 9y ago
        There no compatibility info on MDN[0] for mobile devices? [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History_API#AutoCompatibilityTable https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History_API...
    - SquareWheel 9y ago
      Uh, because it's an open standard rather than a proprietary one?
MBCook 9y ago
Why are they crowing about how much faster it is? I imagine if they stripped off all the stuff from their own sites that doesn't show up on AMP the speed would basically be the same, and they wouldn't be under Google's thumb. No massive header with lots of images of other stories, no master folder with lots of images of other stories, no giant sidebar with lots of images of other stories… get rid of all of them. All of a sudden your page is really fast and doesn't take 45s to load. Remember what the web was like on dial-up? Design pages for that but with large images. Text goes a LONG way for navigation and discovery of other stories. You don't need ridiculous big images. Do something really simple. Make a page with content that looks exactly like the AMP page. AB test that against the AMP page. I'd be willing to bet they basically perform the same, modulo any benefit Google gives you for being part of their lock-in. Text articles with pictures do not require the complexity of googles infrastructure and systems to be fast and lite.
- donohoe 9y ago
  The irony was that we were doing exactly that at The New Yorker (one of the many Conde Nast sites) - rebuilding the article page as a start point. We had to pause that project and drop it all to go work on AMP... (so you could fairly say I'm a bit bitter about that)
  - chrisabrams 9y ago
    Mike's bitterness is point on. Source: I dealt with the same shit as Mike. BTW Hey Mike miss you!
  - Spivak 9y ago
    I mean it's basically the same work you were doing before but now your articles can be featured in Google's carousel and you get absolutely no 'wink wink' ranking boosts.
- slackoverflower 9y ago
  You seem to be the missing the whole point of AMP's popularity. The glorious sliding carousel on Google.com that gives any news website a massive SEO boost. AMP is the biggest thing to hit the SEO industry in a while. I imagine most of these media companies could not give a shit about website optimization, its all about website monetization.
donohoe 9y ago
Completely 100% nit-pick here, but just wanted to say that The New Yorker was the first Conde property up on AMP (June 14th 2016), and we used WordPress. Wired and Pitchfork followed after that. But its not a competition.
- oscrperez 9y ago
  Vanity Fair launched 6/23/2016, the first brand on the Autopilot stack. Sorry if I didn't mention brands that launched AMP on Wordpress. That would have probably added confusion to readers outside the company that do not know about our Wordpress -> Autopilot migrations.
  - donohoe 9y ago
    Don't worry. Total nit-pick on my part :)
prewett 9y ago
> AMP delivers many benefits in terms of performance, consistency, and experience for our mobile users. Performance: yes. Consistency: NO. It looks like one of those annoying download-my-app bars, but it isn't, it's a back button. As if I didn't already have one of those. Experience: NO. It sucks up space on my mobile device, and I can't get rid of it. User feedback: can't wait for iOS 11 and Safari's anti-AMP. Unfortunately, I don't see anywhere I can give user feedback.
- kllrnohj 9y ago
  > Experience: NO. It sucks up space on my mobile device, and I can't get rid of it. What sucks up space that you can't get rid of? It's just a web page, same as any other page.
  - stan_rogers 9y ago
    You're thinking storage; op is talking screen.
    - kllrnohj 9y ago
      But it scrolls off the screen? So getting rid of it is just scroll down?
- oscrperez 9y ago
  You're specifically talking about Google's AMP viewer, and your concerns are UX opinion about their UI which hopefully the AMP team will improve. The reasoning behind consistency and experience which we talk about in the post are mainly with regards the AMP content itself. Valid AMP content (passing the AMP validator) from different publishers behaves very similar to each other. Meaning you won't have any surprises as the content loads, and it will load very quickly. The experience benefits revolve around the AMP Runtime loading advertisement and embeds on-demand without blocking the main content itself from displaying properly or causing it to re-layout as the user starts reading.
  - 9y ago
tannhaeuser 9y ago
If Google ranks AMP pages higher than regular pages just because they're AMP pages and hosted on Google property, this simply spells the begin of the end for Google search as we know it. Who needs that kind of manipulated crap search? Given the race to the bottom on the web, soon Wikipedia, StackExchange, Reddit and HN search already covers everything that Google search does anyway. Oh, and Google, don't let the EU know about this new anti-competitive behavior of yours. Interesting time for small-scale and custom search sites ahead.
WillPostForFood 9y ago
The real problem is the "why" which, whether people admit it or not, is because Google is blackmailing publishers to follow their rules else be punished in search results. The whole modern web is basically defined by trying to conform to what Google wants.
- eighthnate 9y ago
  Google worked with some of the major publishers to create AMP just like facebook did with their instant article. So I wouldn't call it blackmail, more like a collaboration. It's a way for major publishers to get a dominant/favored position and crowd out "fake news" and it's a way for google to get a monopolistic publishing platform. So it is a "win-win" for google and some of the major publishing industry. It is a lose-lose for everyone else. Publishing/media has been waging a war against social media and decentralized internet. They have to losing audience due to the fractured nature of the internet. And they are trying to get back their "captive audience". Whether it works or not, we'll see.
  - WillPostForFood 9y ago
    I guess since I am in the everyone else category, I was focusing more on the lose-lose than the collaboration with big publishers.
whyagaindavid 9y ago
Suggestion: use AMP-api to modify all browser requests to load Google CDN AMP page. Save data.
garganzol 9y ago
Google AMP is an attempt to racket the web by stealing content and traffic while bribing a poor victim with "increased SEO" factor. How dare are you, Google? Open and decentralized world wide web is the thing that allowed you to exist in the first place.
javindo 9y ago
I really wish Google AMP didn't overrule the Chrome android "force enable pinch to zoom" from an accessibility standpoint.

104 points by taveras 9y ago

Wow, 36% of traffic seems pretty high. That's a huge chunk of mobile (79% apparently), with an almost doubled click-through rate. As much as HN loves to bicker about Amp, in this case it was clearly a net positive.

ghostbrainalpha 9y ago
Of course it is net positive for the early adopters. Google gives preference to its AMP publishers and its search engine. Once we all switch over in pursuance of the huge gains, the benefits will disappear because the AMP will just be the new cost of entry. And what freedoms will be lost when we are all required to run AMP website?
- recursive 9y ago
  At that point, all the benefits will be reaped by end users. I'm ok with this.
  - throwaway2048 9y ago
    so there is nothing in it for Google?
    - recursive 9y ago
      Oh yeah, good point. There's probably something for them too.
- s17n 9y ago
  Fewer than if we are all required to run Facebook pages.
mrexroad 9y ago
“click through rate from Google search went from 5.9% (Regular) to 10.3% (AMP), and average search position went from 5.9 (Regular) to 1.7 (AMP).” So ranking #2 in search results on average correlated with an increase in click through rate. Oh, btw, just happens that you gotta use AMP to get the SERP gain.
- donohoe 9y ago
  Well, bear in mind the "carousel" of AMP articles that Google shows on results pages. This is where the lift is coming from.
niftich 9y ago
Sure, they want their content to be read, to be "discoverable by the largest possible audience". Meanwhile, "monetization benefits are less decisive and pending further analysis of our current implementation." Publishers find a number of benefits to AMP -- revealed frankly in the article -- but the only reason they use it in the first place is because Google is where a lot of those eyeballs originate anyway. If Some Obscure Search Engine with ~1% marketshare reworked their mobile page to prioritize pages that adhere to some criteria of limitations, used an iframe to frame the content so that it loads inside their page, and threw in a free CDN to sweeten the deal, who'd retool their publishing infrastructure -- as excellently detailed in this post -- to publish in this format? AMP enables an alliance of convenience between one of the top sources of traffic (Google), and the authors of long-form textual content reliant on advertising revenue. To the AMP team's credit, it does so by aligning closer than its competitors to how the web actually works, despite the Google-Search-on-Mobile page then acting as a captive newsreader. Most user criticism of AMP is focused on Google-Search-on-Mobile stealth-morphing into a captive newsreader, while most publisher criticism of AMP is from sites outside of its target market trying out the tech and alarmed at the lack of traffic reaching their server, forgetting that offloading traffic at high volumes is a good thing. AMP isn't for people who are upset that Google is stealing your content; it's for publishers who want Google to expose their content to wide audience and hope to generate revenue through means that correlate to that reach.
- s17n 9y ago
  I think most of the criticism of AMP is the URLs being messed up, which is something that will soon be fixed.
  - tyingq 9y ago
    I don't imagine most publishers would normally place a banner at the top of the page that someone else controls. With an [x] button that closes your page and goes back to that "someone else".
  - donohoe 9y ago
    No. This will not be fixed. As long as they insist on using their CDN then this cannot be avoided.
ocdtrekkie 9y ago
This article doesn't address any of the reasons people have issues with AMP. All it confirms is what we already know: That Google gives preferential treatment to sites which use their products and services. And, like many engineering blogs about employing Google products, seems like it might've been suggested by a Google marketing team.
- donohoe 9y ago
  No, in most companies the engineers do not write posts because someone from another company reaches out to the marketing team at that company.... developers don't like that and besides, Oscar is a good guy.
  - oscrperez 9y ago
    For real... Tnx!
- oscrperez 9y ago
  This post is not meant to be a critical piece addressing the issues people have with AMP. That's not the goal here. The goal is to show the reason why we serve AMP content and the tech behind it. There's a lot of conspiracy theories and misunderstanding about how AMP works in the community. AMP is by no means perfect, but its dangers are greatly exaggerated. If you don't trust Google's CDN, no one is forcing you to use Google. The benefits for non-tech users (e.g. my cousin in a 3rd world country with a 2G connection) are there and are clear.
  - ocdtrekkie 9y ago
    Actually, Google is forcing you to use Google. Because your search rankings are dependent on Google getting to cache your content on Google's CDN. There is no situation where you can have your content only cached on someone else's CDN, and get all of the borderline illegal perks of Google favoring content stored on their servers.
tyingq 9y ago
Moving to AMP puts them in the carousel, so yes, they got more traffic (at lower revenues per visit). Others will move to AMP, then the traffic will wane. Then Google will make their next move. This is exactly how Froogle/Google product search went.
donohoe 9y ago
Yes and no. You can imagine that some of this is new traffic they otherwise would not have gotten and another % is cannibalizing existing traffic they usually get via Google. >> in this case it was clearly a net positive Not so fast. When I was there, the earlier experiment was that its was a "mixed" success. This post also suggests strongly to me that that hasn't changed too much ("Monetization benefits are less decisive and pending further analysis"). For many publishers it comes down to they cant get slightly more traffic with AMP (because of the AMP carousel in Search results) at a lower CPM which is a positive. However, as more publishers come on board that gets tricky all over again and risk of it becoming another race to the bottom of lower CPMs.

deleted 9y ago

[deleted]

taytus 9y ago

Google AMP has a lot of success stories: https://www.ampproject.org/case-studies/ https://www.ampproject.org/case-studies/

zackbloom 9y ago

FYI if you're interested in AMP but don't want to be served from a google.com domain, Cloudflare also has a compatible implementation: https://www.cloudflare.com/website-optimization/accelerated-mobile-links/ https://www.cloudflare.com/website-optimization/accelerated-...

wmf 9y ago
This doesn't do what you think. Google search always uses the Google AMP viewer and the Google AMP cache; there's no way to make it use Cloudflare.

yakz 9y ago

As an end-user, AMP breaks 'back' on my iPhone when I navigate to articles (including those from Condé Nast) linked to from Google News. I have to scroll up and use Google's custom back button; using left/right swipe gestures or the browser's back causes problems. Sometimes it's so bad that when I reload the page, I get some weird error from Google about how I got there, which is doubly weird because it's their fault I'm there because they're intentionally wrapping/breaking standard functionality.

kllrnohj 9y ago
Browser back button works fine in chrome on a Android with amp pages fwiw. Does safari mobile not support the session history management APIs? caniuse says it does, but it sounds like it doesn't work from what you're saying.
- callalex 9y ago
  And ActiveX worked fine with Internet Explorer on Windows. We look back and consider that a bad thing for the web, how is this different?
  - kllrnohj 9y ago
    Session history management APIs are a W3C standard supported by all major browsers. This is nothing like activex.
    - oneweekwonder 9y ago
      There no compatibility info on MDN[0] for mobile devices? [0] https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History_API#AutoCompatibilityTable https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/API/History_API...
  - SquareWheel 9y ago
    Uh, because it's an open standard rather than a proprietary one?

MBCook 9y ago

Why are they crowing about how much faster it is? I imagine if they stripped off all the stuff from their own sites that doesn't show up on AMP the speed would basically be the same, and they wouldn't be under Google's thumb. No massive header with lots of images of other stories, no master folder with lots of images of other stories, no giant sidebar with lots of images of other stories… get rid of all of them. All of a sudden your page is really fast and doesn't take 45s to load. Remember what the web was like on dial-up? Design pages for that but with large images. Text goes a LONG way for navigation and discovery of other stories. You don't need ridiculous big images. Do something really simple. Make a page with content that looks exactly like the AMP page. AB test that against the AMP page. I'd be willing to bet they basically perform the same, modulo any benefit Google gives you for being part of their lock-in. Text articles with pictures do not require the complexity of googles infrastructure and systems to be fast and lite.

donohoe 9y ago
The irony was that we were doing exactly that at The New Yorker (one of the many Conde Nast sites) - rebuilding the article page as a start point. We had to pause that project and drop it all to go work on AMP... (so you could fairly say I'm a bit bitter about that)
- chrisabrams 9y ago
  Mike's bitterness is point on. Source: I dealt with the same shit as Mike. BTW Hey Mike miss you!
- Spivak 9y ago
  I mean it's basically the same work you were doing before but now your articles can be featured in Google's carousel and you get absolutely no 'wink wink' ranking boosts.
slackoverflower 9y ago
You seem to be the missing the whole point of AMP's popularity. The glorious sliding carousel on Google.com that gives any news website a massive SEO boost. AMP is the biggest thing to hit the SEO industry in a while. I imagine most of these media companies could not give a shit about website optimization, its all about website monetization.

donohoe 9y ago

Completely 100% nit-pick here, but just wanted to say that The New Yorker was the first Conde property up on AMP (June 14th 2016), and we used WordPress. Wired and Pitchfork followed after that. But its not a competition.

oscrperez 9y ago
Vanity Fair launched 6/23/2016, the first brand on the Autopilot stack. Sorry if I didn't mention brands that launched AMP on Wordpress. That would have probably added confusion to readers outside the company that do not know about our Wordpress -> Autopilot migrations.
- donohoe 9y ago
  Don't worry. Total nit-pick on my part :)

prewett 9y ago

> AMP delivers many benefits in terms of performance, consistency, and experience for our mobile users. Performance: yes. Consistency: NO. It looks like one of those annoying download-my-app bars, but it isn't, it's a back button. As if I didn't already have one of those. Experience: NO. It sucks up space on my mobile device, and I can't get rid of it. User feedback: can't wait for iOS 11 and Safari's anti-AMP. Unfortunately, I don't see anywhere I can give user feedback.

kllrnohj 9y ago
> Experience: NO. It sucks up space on my mobile device, and I can't get rid of it. What sucks up space that you can't get rid of? It's just a web page, same as any other page.
- stan_rogers 9y ago
  You're thinking storage; op is talking screen.
  - kllrnohj 9y ago
    But it scrolls off the screen? So getting rid of it is just scroll down?
oscrperez 9y ago
You're specifically talking about Google's AMP viewer, and your concerns are UX opinion about their UI which hopefully the AMP team will improve. The reasoning behind consistency and experience which we talk about in the post are mainly with regards the AMP content itself. Valid AMP content (passing the AMP validator) from different publishers behaves very similar to each other. Meaning you won't have any surprises as the content loads, and it will load very quickly. The experience benefits revolve around the AMP Runtime loading advertisement and embeds on-demand without blocking the main content itself from displaying properly or causing it to re-layout as the user starts reading.
- 9y ago

tannhaeuser 9y ago

If Google ranks AMP pages higher than regular pages just because they're AMP pages and hosted on Google property, this simply spells the begin of the end for Google search as we know it. Who needs that kind of manipulated crap search? Given the race to the bottom on the web, soon Wikipedia, StackExchange, Reddit and HN search already covers everything that Google search does anyway. Oh, and Google, don't let the EU know about this new anti-competitive behavior of yours. Interesting time for small-scale and custom search sites ahead.

WillPostForFood 9y ago

The real problem is the "why" which, whether people admit it or not, is because Google is blackmailing publishers to follow their rules else be punished in search results. The whole modern web is basically defined by trying to conform to what Google wants.

eighthnate 9y ago
Google worked with some of the major publishers to create AMP just like facebook did with their instant article. So I wouldn't call it blackmail, more like a collaboration. It's a way for major publishers to get a dominant/favored position and crowd out "fake news" and it's a way for google to get a monopolistic publishing platform. So it is a "win-win" for google and some of the major publishing industry. It is a lose-lose for everyone else. Publishing/media has been waging a war against social media and decentralized internet. They have to losing audience due to the fractured nature of the internet. And they are trying to get back their "captive audience". Whether it works or not, we'll see.
- WillPostForFood 9y ago
  I guess since I am in the everyone else category, I was focusing more on the lose-lose than the collaboration with big publishers.

whyagaindavid 9y ago

Suggestion: use AMP-api to modify all browser requests to load Google CDN AMP page. Save data.

garganzol 9y ago

Google AMP is an attempt to racket the web by stealing content and traffic while bribing a poor victim with "increased SEO" factor. How dare are you, Google? Open and decentralized world wide web is the thing that allowed you to exist in the first place.

javindo 9y ago

I really wish Google AMP didn't overrule the Chrome android "force enable pinch to zoom" from an accessibility standpoint.