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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

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.

prewett 9y ago
Ok, sure, my problem is with Google's AMP view. But, as a user, my experience on your AMP pages is inconsistent with my experience on the rest of the web. As a user, I don't like it. As a user, consistency between different publishers is not important to me: I don't read very many anyway, and I am totally okay if they look different. I expect them to look different, in fact. But the other points, correct me if I'm wrong, but it basically sounds like you are saying "AMP forces our content across publishers to be consistent, and it has a structure that makes sure advertisements don't block page loading." As a web publisher, though, surely Conde Nast has control over the layout of its content. And as a web publisher, it is part of Conde Nast's job to make sure the content loads quickly and that the ads do not block page loading. At the risk of sounding aggressive, your reasons sound like "AMP enables us to outsource all the hard parts of our job." As to the experience benefits are ads loading more smoothly, as a user, is an experience benefit. Technically. Except that, as a user, ads substantially decrease my experience. I get that Conde Nast exists to make money, that I don't want to pay money for the privilege, and that we are fundamentally at odds here. But attempting to sell faster loading of ads to me in the guise of improving my user experience feels somewhat disingenuous.
- oscrperez 9y ago
  AMP content does look different, even across our own brands. I'm talking about the experience of tapping on a link from Google's search results. For non-AMP content some publishers might show you an interstitial ad, or a banner ad that pushes down the content as you start reading it, some publishers don't/can't do caching correctly, can't optimize images cross resolutions, etc. It's a frustrating experience for the web, specially when you compare it to the Apple's News app for example. Let alone if you're trying to search for web content on a 2G connection... AMP incentivizes publishers to implement behavior and functionality that results in a better and consistent experience for the Google end user, this is a fact. Sure, the incentives for the publisher often boil down to SEO and ensuring their content is discoverable on the Google platform (as mentioned in the post when we talk about visibility and discoverability). We can discuss how ethical or unethical it is for Google to use SEO incentives in order to push publishers to deliver AMP content, but that's a different conversation. I fully believe in the open web, when compared to Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles, AMP is clearly the more open solution. Even thought AMP is not perfect, I truly believe the benefits for the end users on the Google platform are there. Condé Nast does have full control over our content and sites. Don't forget, the majority of the traffic to our business is non-amp. Our regular sites perform really well (specially when compared with other players in our space) and we're constantly improving them. We're absolutely doing the hard work there and will continue to do so. We will also continue to distribute content to other platforms besides Google AMP whenever it makes sense.

prewett 9y ago

Ok, sure, my problem is with Google's AMP view. But, as a user, my experience on your AMP pages is inconsistent with my experience on the rest of the web. As a user, I don't like it. As a user, consistency between different publishers is not important to me: I don't read very many anyway, and I am totally okay if they look different. I expect them to look different, in fact. But the other points, correct me if I'm wrong, but it basically sounds like you are saying "AMP forces our content across publishers to be consistent, and it has a structure that makes sure advertisements don't block page loading." As a web publisher, though, surely Conde Nast has control over the layout of its content. And as a web publisher, it is part of Conde Nast's job to make sure the content loads quickly and that the ads do not block page loading. At the risk of sounding aggressive, your reasons sound like "AMP enables us to outsource all the hard parts of our job." As to the experience benefits are ads loading more smoothly, as a user, is an experience benefit. Technically. Except that, as a user, ads substantially decrease my experience. I get that Conde Nast exists to make money, that I don't want to pay money for the privilege, and that we are fundamentally at odds here. But attempting to sell faster loading of ads to me in the guise of improving my user experience feels somewhat disingenuous.

oscrperez 9y ago
AMP content does look different, even across our own brands. I'm talking about the experience of tapping on a link from Google's search results. For non-AMP content some publishers might show you an interstitial ad, or a banner ad that pushes down the content as you start reading it, some publishers don't/can't do caching correctly, can't optimize images cross resolutions, etc. It's a frustrating experience for the web, specially when you compare it to the Apple's News app for example. Let alone if you're trying to search for web content on a 2G connection... AMP incentivizes publishers to implement behavior and functionality that results in a better and consistent experience for the Google end user, this is a fact. Sure, the incentives for the publisher often boil down to SEO and ensuring their content is discoverable on the Google platform (as mentioned in the post when we talk about visibility and discoverability). We can discuss how ethical or unethical it is for Google to use SEO incentives in order to push publishers to deliver AMP content, but that's a different conversation. I fully believe in the open web, when compared to Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles, AMP is clearly the more open solution. Even thought AMP is not perfect, I truly believe the benefits for the end users on the Google platform are there. Condé Nast does have full control over our content and sites. Don't forget, the majority of the traffic to our business is non-amp. Our regular sites perform really well (specially when compared with other players in our space) and we're constantly improving them. We're absolutely doing the hard work there and will continue to do so. We will also continue to distribute content to other platforms besides Google AMP whenever it makes sense.