Sure, they want their content to be read, to be "discoverable by the largest possible audience". Meanwhile, "monetization benefits are less decisive and pendin

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.