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I'm not saying that a significant portion of the world population hates AMP. I'm saying: take the extremely tiny portion of people who have heard of AMP, and th

I'm not saying that a significant portion of the world population hates AMP. I'm saying: take the extremely tiny portion of people who have heard of AMP, and then estimate how many of them like AMP or dislike AMP. AMP's detractors are few in number, but they overwhelm AMP's supporters, who are even fewer in number.

eli 9y ago
AMP has a mostly positive reputation in the world of digital publishers--and they definitely know what it is. I've heard from people at two different publishers that the decline in traffic due to the recent Facebook algorithm update has almost been made up by a dramatic increase in Google traffic to AMP pages. (see https://www.axios.com/google-traffic-explodes-doubling-down-on-mobile-news-ad69c8ec-b44e-4d63-8995-a3e6869e8002.html https://www.axios.com/google-traffic-explodes-doubling-down-...) The main complaint I hear is that AMP pages are pain in the ass to produce, not anything about walled gardens or canonical URLs. Consider that most of the people making decisions are weighing AMP strategically against FB Instant Pages.
- donohoe 9y ago
  No. As someone who works in media/publishing I’m gonna disagree there. I can speak for colleagues across many publishers too. Within the industry it’s hated. There are implications for ad revenue too that I’m not going to go into here. Don’t get me wrong, some love it but more hate it - for a variety of reasons.
  - eli 9y ago
    Well if you believe the data from Chartbeat, a whole lot of publishers are going through the non-trivial effort of publishing in AMP even if they don't like it.
    - goalieca 9y ago
      Because your google search rank depends on it
    - reificator 9y ago
      It's funny: If you ask what people think about being held at gunpoint they're not usually very keen on it. But when I hold them at gunpoint and tell them to dance like a chicken, they all do it. Doesn't seem like they hate it after all. Sometimes they even cry tears of joy...
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
- manigandham 9y ago
  We work with hundreds of publishers and they all hate it. HTML is already fast. The junk added to the page is what makes to slow. A new fork of HTML is just another development resource drain for no real benefit.
  - ec109685 9y ago
    Plain HTML sites are faster than having your article loaded instantly by the browser?
    - manigandham 9y ago
      Is HN (the site you're on right now) somehow slow? What is this magical instant loading you're talking about? Content still has to be requested, downloaded and parsed. AMP is a fork of HTML with a required JS framework and a strict set of rules about how other media can be added to the page. AMP sites are also cached on a free Google CDN. None of this is necessary or worth the dev effort for sites, they only do it because of search rankings. The reason sites are slow is because they add so much stuff to the page that comes from vendors using bloated heavy frameworks and bad coding. Remove or optimize that and sites are perfectly quick.
      - ec109685 9y ago
        Google downloads the content in the background before you click on it, so that is why it is fast. I agree hacker news is super fast (and the back button works perfectly!), as long as you have a reliable internet connection. I use it as my anti-example as to why we don’t need single page apps to read the news. So I agree: if google can determine your internet seems reliable and the page loads as fast as hacker news from the user’s location, the site should get an amp-style lightening bolt.
- Angostura 9y ago
  > they know what it is. Well, to the extent they know it is a way of getting their site higher up on search results, they love it.

eli 9y ago

AMP has a mostly positive reputation in the world of digital publishers--and they definitely know what it is. I've heard from people at two different publishers that the decline in traffic due to the recent Facebook algorithm update has almost been made up by a dramatic increase in Google traffic to AMP pages. (see https://www.axios.com/google-traffic-explodes-doubling-down-on-mobile-news-ad69c8ec-b44e-4d63-8995-a3e6869e8002.html https://www.axios.com/google-traffic-explodes-doubling-down-...) The main complaint I hear is that AMP pages are pain in the ass to produce, not anything about walled gardens or canonical URLs. Consider that most of the people making decisions are weighing AMP strategically against FB Instant Pages.

donohoe 9y ago
No. As someone who works in media/publishing I’m gonna disagree there. I can speak for colleagues across many publishers too. Within the industry it’s hated. There are implications for ad revenue too that I’m not going to go into here. Don’t get me wrong, some love it but more hate it - for a variety of reasons.
- eli 9y ago
  Well if you believe the data from Chartbeat, a whole lot of publishers are going through the non-trivial effort of publishing in AMP even if they don't like it.
  - goalieca 9y ago
    Because your google search rank depends on it
  - reificator 9y ago
    It's funny: If you ask what people think about being held at gunpoint they're not usually very keen on it. But when I hold them at gunpoint and tell them to dance like a chicken, they all do it. Doesn't seem like they hate it after all. Sometimes they even cry tears of joy...
- deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
manigandham 9y ago
We work with hundreds of publishers and they all hate it. HTML is already fast. The junk added to the page is what makes to slow. A new fork of HTML is just another development resource drain for no real benefit.
- ec109685 9y ago
  Plain HTML sites are faster than having your article loaded instantly by the browser?
  - manigandham 9y ago
    Is HN (the site you're on right now) somehow slow? What is this magical instant loading you're talking about? Content still has to be requested, downloaded and parsed. AMP is a fork of HTML with a required JS framework and a strict set of rules about how other media can be added to the page. AMP sites are also cached on a free Google CDN. None of this is necessary or worth the dev effort for sites, they only do it because of search rankings. The reason sites are slow is because they add so much stuff to the page that comes from vendors using bloated heavy frameworks and bad coding. Remove or optimize that and sites are perfectly quick.
    - ec109685 9y ago
      Google downloads the content in the background before you click on it, so that is why it is fast. I agree hacker news is super fast (and the back button works perfectly!), as long as you have a reliable internet connection. I use it as my anti-example as to why we don’t need single page apps to read the news. So I agree: if google can determine your internet seems reliable and the page loads as fast as hacker news from the user’s location, the site should get an amp-style lightening bolt.
Angostura 9y ago
> they know what it is. Well, to the extent they know it is a way of getting their site higher up on search results, they love it.