13 ms·

Google AMP case study: leads dropped by 59%

336 points by krn 8y ago

emayljames 8y ago
Hopefully this one-sided, web damaging framework will die a death like IE finally did, with its awful standards.
- setquk 8y ago
  Definitely. I can’t understand why the hell anyone would want to use it anyway. The experience is terrible.
  - Filligree 8y ago
    It's wonderful when browsing. Pages load in less than half a minute, unlike nearly the entire rest of the internet. Hacker News doesn't need it, but they're nearly unique in having written a good website.
    - zzleeper 8y ago
      I abhor it on mobile. I can't navigate away from it easily, it's hard to copy paste annurl to share with others, etc. I wish Chrome had the option to disable it, but of course they don't.
      - madeofpalk 8y ago
        > I can't navigate away from it easily eh? You can't hit 'back'?
        tyingq 8y ago
        It does hijack the back button for carousel loaded pages in a way that's odd. Search for some newsworthy word, say "trump". Click a carousel story. Swipe right (another hijack), and the page loads a story from a competitor to the publisher of the original loaded AMP page. Now, hit the back button. One assumes it would go to the original loaded story, right? Nope, it goes back to Google. Surely that wasn't intentional, right?
        grogenaut 8y ago
        Going back to google makes sense as my intention is to read the news of the day, not cross reference. Stack behavior would drive me crazy here.
        tyingq 8y ago
        I suppose, but that sort of reinforces the real purpose of AMP. No publisher in their right mind would give up the top part of their page and enable left/right swipe to navigate to competitors, give up the back button control, etc. It's basically a protection racket. Pay up (in control terms), or get pushed down the search results page. Feels a lot like the old "digg bar" (https://moz.com/ugc/die-diggbar-die-die-should-you-kill-the-digg-bar-on-your-website https://moz.com/ugc/die-diggbar-die-die-should-you-kill-the-...)
        grogenaut 8y ago
        For me though, they already have. I don't browse via their nav. I spearfish articles and I'm out. I find most news sites navigation and search garbage and have to resort to site: searches
        criddell 8y ago
        > No publisher in their right mind would give up the top part of their page and enable left/right swipe to navigate to competitors Publishers usually do not make good decisions. That behavior is for users and (IMHO) it's great.
        notahacker 8y ago
        That behaviour is for Google, not for users.
        ryanwaggoner 8y ago
        It constantly breaks the back button and screws up my history.
        AnssiH 8y ago
        They might also mean "go to the non-AMP version", which is my main issue with AMP. I'd like to get the non-AMP page to e.g. see user comments (if any) which are often omitted from the AMP version, or for posting the non-AMP URL to friends or social media. Sometimes there is an easy way to go to non-AMP page, depending on how you got there, but most of the time for me there is not. For example, this article just appeared on my Google feed on my phone, with no way to open the non-AMP version: https://www.vice.com/amp/en_uk/article/wda7jm/where-does-he-get-those-terrible-toys-an-interview-with-ashens-008 https://www.vice.com/amp/en_uk/article/wda7jm/where-does-he-... My preferred option would be to have AMP permanently disabled on my phone.
        freedomben 8y ago
        I couldn't agree more. The problem with AMP is that it isn't possible to disable it. Other than that, I appreciate what Google is trying to do, even if their implementation has a few flaws.
        yorwba 8y ago
        How to disable AMP permanently on your phone: - stop using Google feed. I can't recommend a one-stop replacement, since I use RSS to follow sites I trust to produce high-quality content and HN to discover new stuff. - stop using other Google products that link to AMP pages. DuckDuckGo is good enough these days. - use Firefox. That in itself might prevent Google search from showing AMP results, if you can't bear to use DDG. At least someone said so two years ago in this thread on Google's product forums https://productforums.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=topic/news/ixPneB4vpGk https://productforums.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=t... - install https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/ in Firefox. It still needs to load the AMP page to grab the canonical URL, but then it redirects to the non-AMP version. You can also add an adblocker like uBlock Origin while you're at it. The ability to install addons is what makes Firefox the best mobile browser in my opinion.
        emayljames 8y ago
        I just thought of this great Ffox addon that I use too. AMP pages are not real web pages. They are awful.
      - freedomben 8y ago
        I'm agnostic on AMP, but I very much agree with you that they should add the option to disable. Android is all about choice and user empowerment! That's why I love it
        cronix 8y ago
        > Android is all about choice and user empowerment! I disagree, strongly. I believe Android is really more about keeping you in the Google ecosystem. So is AMP, so is Chrome. I'm an Android user, but let's not pretend they are really about "choice and user empowerment." That's just the sales pitch. Every single thing Google creates is to collect information on/from us, because that's their revenue model. Selling our data. If you disagree, compare the ad revenue from all of them. Who's is miles ahead? Why? How? You're giving them your data. A LOT of it.
        freedomben 8y ago
        Agreed regarding ulterior motives (keeping you in their ecosystem). In the excellent book "In The Plex" by Steven Levy, he talks about Google's motivation of essentially building a browser, mobile OS, etc just to ensure that some other party (like Apple) doesn't cut them out and reduce their search/ad domination. I believe protecting search/ads is at the base of their motives (as is, undeniably, vacuuming up tons of data and mining it for ML purposes). But that said, why do so much for open source? Why not keep big things proprietary? Why sell Chromebooks that can be unlocked, put in dev mode, and flashed with FOSS BIOS implementations? Why allow unlocking the bootloader on Nexus and Pixel phones? There's lots of things they do that clearly aren't for the bottom line or just to trap you in their ecosystem (they do offer versions of basically everything for iOS as well, which makes it easier to switch to iPhone even if you are deep in the Google ecosystem). Some of my argument is emotionally based tho, I will admit. After being trapped in Apple's very proprietary, anti-competitive, you-dont-own-it-we-do system, I find the ability to reclaim some freedom (tho not all, they could do better) very nice. So I think our only real disagreement is likely regarding motives.
        pdkl95 8y ago
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
  - pacifika 8y ago
    Purely to keep the SEO positioning everyone enjoyed before it came into being.
    - PaulHoule 8y ago
      "Recycling of lost faculties". They take it away from you and then you will bend over and kiss Matt's Butt.
  - untog 8y ago
    It isn't though, really. Page load really is nearly instantaneous. I'm no fan of AMP, but I see the reasons why users like it.
    - dep_b 8y ago
      You're right about that, but AMP'ed pages not coming from Google's cache are already really fast. Actually they're only preloading those pages while you're on the results page, which is something they could do as a reward for all pages that have a reduced page weight.
      - lern_too_spel 8y ago
        It is not safe to preload arbitrary web pages. The user will be deanonymized to a site they never visited. It is safe to preload AMP pages by design.
        manigandham 8y ago
        And yet now you never leave Google's servers when browsing. They know your entire path from search to site and back again.
        lern_too_spel 8y ago
        Google would have known you clicked on the link anyway. You would prefer the publishers and ad networks track users on pages they never even visit?
        manigandham 8y ago
        AMP pages mean Google has 1st party access to your browser no matter what you browse, which is far more than normal. I didn't state any preferences, and how would sites track you on pages you don't visit?
        8y ago
  - tyingq 8y ago
    Publishers use it because otherwise their stories don't end up in the carousel widget for Google searches. I don't think many of them are actually buying into the AMP hype. They are just backed into a corner.
    - frandroid 8y ago
      I can confirm this. Source: working at my country's largest newspaper.
  - JustSomeNobody 8y ago
    It only takes a couple business to start using it and always winding up at the top of search before everyone else feels they have to like it or not.
  - notatoad 8y ago
    So you prefer when pages take >10s to load, have interstitial ads covering the content, and have ads that load in while you scroll, causing the content to jump around on you? I'm pretty happy with amp as an alternative to newspapers' awful websites.
    - cronix 8y ago
      Reader view in firefox makes it very fast. Like how the web used to be. It just displays the images/text of the actual content and strips everything else out. I immediately hit that button on most sites now, and they load in under 1s (usually way under). It even has a dark mode! No videos playing, no ads changing in sidebars distracting your eyes, no popups making your click through. Just the content you wanted to see. I just wish you could make it the default mode.
      - baobrain 8y ago
        Often times the websites are completely broken under reader mode: images are in the wrong locations, image captions are treated as article text, article text doesn't appear on websites that have awful scrolling behaviour. I completely understand why people have problems with AMP. However, AMP is a drop-in replacement (for the user) and Firefox's reader mode is simply not equivalent, as much as I use it.
      - deleted 8y ago
        [deleted]
  - tylerl 8y ago
    But not QUITE as terrible as the UX of news sites without AMP. Which I suppose was the point.
- GuB-42 8y ago
  There are two sides with AMP: - A set of enforced good practices that make sites faster and generally more user friendly - A way for Google to get more control by introducing a semi-proprietary framework The disturbing thing is that webmasters usually criticize the first aspect. Basically they want to bloat their sites and AMP doesn't let them do it. They don't really care about the second part. They are already using Google analytics, Google ads and optimize for Google search anyways. It means that the ones who can do something want AMP to die for all the wrong reasons. For that reason, I think that AMP is good (or less bad). Even better would be to do what AMP does but without the Google framework. That would make it even faster than AMP because there won't be any Google bloat.
xiphias2 8y ago
Front end engineers are not selected for their skills in understanding algorithms and data structures. It's quite easy to speed up a web site if you understand how CPU works on a low level and how Javascript is compiled to machine code, but it requires a lot of knowledge.
- walshemj 8y ago
  Err you don't need to know how Js is compiled. You need to understand how html css and js work and not cut and paste megabytes of cruft.
- mercer 8y ago
  Very little knowledge is needed to know how to speed up a website (or keep it from becoming slow). Almost every front-ender I've met, including those who never got beyond inserting jQuery snippets, knows enough.
  - walshemj 8y ago
    In 16 plus years of consulting I have had precisely 2 occasions when I found a dev team that knew what they where doing.
    - tyingq 8y ago
      My experience over a similar time period is that most of what appears to be dev team incompetence...isn't. It usually maps to constraints they can't control.
  - sureaboutthis 8y ago
    Speeding a site up is one thing. Speeding it up substantially is another and I doubt your example of one who only knows how to insert jQuery snippets knows enough to both understand and implement all the details from server to network to browser.
    - mort96 8y ago
asdfologist 8y ago
As a user I like AMP because it's guaranteed to be very fast. There, I said it.
- fatjokes 8y ago
  Completely agree as a user.
  - PaulHoule 8y ago
    Its fast when it works. On my tablet is a crap shoot if you see any content at all.
- tyingq 8y ago
  Well sure, Google isn't dumb. Adding in enough benefits (speed, carousel placement) to your Trojan horse ensures there are plausible reasons to bring it into the fort. Publishers certainly wouldn't give up the most important bits of their page (the top), and cede left/right swipe hijacking (on carousel loaded pages) if there weren't some perceived benefit.
  - PaulHoule 8y ago
    "Perceived" benefit is the key. It used to be the "World Wide Web" but now it is the "Google Platform" and we just live in it. After Google established that useful web search was possible the realized that the #1 competitor for their ads was organic rankings, and if you could really get a #1 ranking by investing in the best content then why would you spend money on ads? So since then it is has been about deliberately degrading the search results so you learn to look at the ads instead, giving people bad S.E.O. advice, etc.
    - izacus 8y ago
      Your conspirancy theory completely ignores the whole shitshow of 15MB+ textual websites we've had to endure in those last years.
franze 8y ago
the easiest way to get rid of AMP pages is rolling out an !important; in the AMP CSS - so invalidating the AMP pages. wait until they are kicked out from the google cache (see your trusted google search console, best the useable old one). then remove the references to the AMP page from the non-AMP pages. then delete the AMPs. usually takes 2 to 3 days for a few thousand pages.
izacus 8y ago
What exactly are "leads" in this context?
- tyingq 8y ago
  The article heavily implies sales leads...collected email addresses to try and convert into sales. They sell managed wordpress hosting. However, their site doesn't appear to have much in terms of collecting leads. No newsletters, no trial accounts, etc. They just have paid plans you can sign up for. I guess the "contact us" page could be considered a lead generator. So, I'm as confused as you are. Lead generation would be pretty bad if you don't collect leads :)
amelius 8y ago
A company trying to hijack the web is not a good idea.
soared 8y ago
> Could we have done more conversion rate optimization to our AMP install? Probably yes. There are ways to add CTAs, newsletter signups, etc If I'm reading this correctly they switched from regular pages with CTAs to AMP pages without CTAs. Seemingly this test was designed to fail.
privateSFacct 8y ago
Here's the reality. The Taboola news carousals at the bottom of most slow loading actual news sites are filled with total junk. One page per image websites, super slow, adblock goes crazy. I've literally NEVER had a good experience with these "Stories you may like" Google does something with a news carousel that loads fast and the content isn't crap. I get why publishers running things like taboola think it's terrible, but as a user interested in reading some quick news without going blind, I like it. Hacker news is the exception in terms of a quick loading / clean website. I was a google reader user heavily - so I like the more stripped down view of things even if it's "terrible". One other note about this study. This company's goal is not to educate but to sign up users. At least for myself, Folks who want / like a stripped down experience may just be less interested in being marketed to.
- lol768 8y ago
  > The Taboola news carousals at the bottom of most slow loading actual news sites are filled with total junk. This, a thousands times. For both Taboola and Outbrain it's clickbaity trash - usually misleading and low quality content. They're designed to "disrupt" so that people click on them and have in the past featured on blatantly false news stories. I'd honestly be ashamed to work at one of these sort of organisations and it further underlines how awful the web experience can be if you're not using an ad blocker. It's no surprise to me that AMP is popular among users if news sites are not including such garbage in their AMP renditions.
  - freditup 8y ago
    It's interesting that so many people would enjoy AMP, because on my Android, viewing AMP sites in Google's main app often feels much slower than regular web browsing in Firefox for Android. The difference? I have an ad-blocker in Firefox, but not in Google's app. So Ad-blocking > AMP > Regular (as far as user-experience from a speed perspective). Obviously Google has a lot of incentive to make sure people don't go the ad-blocking route. Though not sure what is keeping ad-blocking from growing given its superiority - likely just a lack of awareness about the option. If ad-blocking ever did grow massively though, the internet would change in ways we haven't yet seen. Either ad-serving companies would win the arms battle and ad-blockers would become ineffective, or, the web would have to move to a new payment model (Brave-like perhaps). I'm not entirely sure what the ideal is - likely a model where users can choose between ads or micropayments is the most pragmatic world.
krn 8y ago
I think that AMP made Google's search results feel like they were essentially just Google's own pages. Because that's exactly what the user sees in his address bar, when he visits an accelerated mobile page: google.com/amp/<...>. And that encourages him to hit "Back" as soon as he is done with it, instead of checking out the newly discovered website. Because he never felt like he had discovered anything. He never felt that he had left Google. The fact, that there are no AMP pages in Google's search results on Firefox Mobile, was the final reason for me to make the switch. I feel like I am browsing the world wide web again, not just a Google's snapshot of it.
- zavi 8y ago
  Users don't see google.com, they see shittypopups.com delivered by Google
sixtypoundhound 8y ago
So another problem with AMP delivered via Google is it tends to utterly booger your analytics... first pageview (via the Google cache) is viewed as a different domain than your site. This can play havoc with optimization efforts. In terms of performance... this is a situation where the AVERAGE AMP site is much faster than the AVERAGE site not using AMP... but that's a rigged game given the volume of non-optimized WordPress junk and god-knows-what coming from the typical advertising server (images, video, scripts). A well-optimized site run by knowledgeable and balanced adults will see a moderate improvement in speed; this is assuming you leaned out the pages already and kept the advertising cruft on a short leash. You can generally beat AMP's load times with some elbow grease.
- ec109685 8y ago
  You can’t beat its load times. Google pre-renders the web page before the user clicks, which isn’t safe to do with pages created by your own elbow grease.
  - drb91 8y ago
    Load times ain’t everything, and it’s a terrible pitch for something that breaks basic rules of browsing.
    - ec109685 8y ago
      This post was specifically saying you could beat AMP’s load times. That isn’t possible.
  - sixtypoundhound 8y ago
    You can actually.... with very, very lean design....
    - ec109685 8y ago
      Nope. You can’t best the speed of light.
erikb 8y ago
I have experienced AMP only from the user perspective and always hated it since day one. Until now I don't really understand where it came from and why people would willingly enable it on their site. The first thing I do when I see it is consider whether to go somewhere else or open the actual underlying link. It already sounds toxic. Instead of loading your page suddenly I load a google wrapper that includes some parts of your page. Doesn't that sound like a red flags for anybody? Does it sound less toxic if I call it "free and open google wrapper build on existing technologies"?
lpasselin 8y ago
The analysis on the google analytics data seems a bit biased against AMP. - decrease in average positions in SERPs on mobile - decrease in CTR on mobile - higher number of impressions - slight increase in total clicks These measures are correlated. You can't just add them all together. More impressions with the same amount of clicks means CTR (click through rate) will drop. Average position should also drop. In this case we see a slight increase in total clicks and almost double impressions! What if adding AMP makes Google show your site to a wider range of audience (more variance on target audience), while assigning your pages a lower weight (average position). You would get this behaviour. Lower average position but more clicks. This could lower your account creation and similar metrics because users are less interested. What I mean is for some websites, getting more clicks would be great. If your total clicks is the goal, you would like these results (ex: page with ads). For search users, this is not good because we are shown pages that are less relevant. I would like more explanations on mobile leads, account creation, and newsletter email sign-ups dropped. Why not show plots? Are these compared to total from previous months or percentages? We should also need to be able to compare both websites (mobile vs AMP) to see if there are any major differences. I am not an SEO expert or web designer but I personally use AMP on my modest website. I don't even have a desktop version. Only AMP. It is simpler that way and took only an afternoon (for a css noob) to switch. What made me switch was their amp-img carousel lightbox. They are simple to use and just work. I tried a plethora of css/js carousel or album viewers and chose AMP. Bonus page speed and better mobile search cards.
- le205 8y ago
  Very much agree with this comment. It’s quite likely that the AMP pages received incremental impressions in lower positions, which reduced the overall average position but increased clicks. The screenshot of rankings from another tool (looks like Accuranker) with a few +1 ranking improvements after disabling AMP also seems insignificant. Often this kind of fluctuation is very normal. Without knowing the baseline level of ranking fluctuation, it’s hard to read too much into this. This is the danger of analysing ‘totals’ without segmentation to better track incrementality. Any test needs to be properly controlled to form clear conclusions and I don’t see enough rigor here. I would however commend the article on its advice to avoid simply ‘disabling’ AMP after using it for a period of time. There is cleanup to be done as the article touches on, and I suspect many may not be aware.
gwern 8y ago
> Our mobile leads dropped by 59.09%. Our newsletter email sign-ups from mobile dropped by 16.67%. Our account creations from mobile devices dropped 10.53%. What happened to total leads/signups/creations?
jaredcwhite 8y ago
Over and over again I'll click a link from Twitter or elsewhere, and in mere moments I'm thinking to myself…waaait a sec, is this another crappy AMP page? It never looks right. It's always "off" in some weird (and sometimes very obvious) way. Nearly every time I go to the real page on the real website, it looks better and functions better. Since I use an ad blocker, it's never a problem for me that the real site might want to load heavier ads on mobile. AMP is a plague on the open web. It's offensive, I never request it, and it never solves any problem for me. I'm glad I use DuckDuckGo as my search engine so I never get kicked to AMP pages from search. As a web developer, I've vowed never to implement AMP on any of my client sites and will explain to my clients why if asked (and so far I've never been asked). Just say no to AMP.
- emayljames 8y ago
  You have hit the nail on the head with this explanation. Just.Say.No!
Rjevski 8y ago
I don’t like AMP, but I am so happy to see when websites complain that “leads dropped by 59%” because of it. For “leads” to drop that much it must mean they weren’t legitimate, happy leads in the first place. I bet those “leads” came from a shit letter popup or other similar dark pattern, in which case AMP works as designed and benefits the user by shielding them from such garbage. AMP is bad for the web in the long term. But it is a decent stop-gap solution given that nobody is willing to make their websites bearable without Google’s pressure. EDIT: I just tried their website again without an ad blocker and sure enough, I was asked to subscribe to their shitletter.
- codazoda 8y ago
  I'm also an Amp hater and welcomed this news. Then, I went to the site. Because I really hate AMP I dismissed all three of their mobile pop ups; one after another. After reading the article I tried to use the back button to go back to hacker news; took three clicks (maybe one for each popup)? I'm guessing you are correct and they need to take another look for causation.
- kentt 8y ago
  Agreed. However, I'm more in favour of AMP because if the reasons you mentioned. Essentially I think Google has tricked a lot of publishers into using less dark patterns and avoiding shooting themselves in the foot with heavy ads and tracking. It's not perfect but from an end user perspective I'm grateful for it.
  - ehsankia 8y ago
    It's also important to note that AMP isn't meant to be used for every site out there. It's only useful for specific sites that have a static landing pages. I still don't understand why sites like reddit use it either.
    - ivanfon 8y ago
      The SEO incentives are likely enough to make any and all types of websites interested in using it.
jchw 8y ago
Please don't turn off AMP actually. Do I really want to sign up for your dumb site's newsletter, or get push notifications? Well, so far I've wanted to do that Literally Zero times in the past, so I'm gonna bet on no.
abalone 8y ago
They don’t actually say why they think leads declined. They list a few reasons why they think it didn’t increase, e.g. they’re already fast on mobile. But they don’t explain a 59% drop in leads. Crucially they note that impressions and clicks actually increased with AMP. That points to an unflattering explanation: the AMP format is blocking techniques they use to turn clicks into leads. So why don’t they discuss the reasons for the drop? Perhaps because they know those techniques are user hostile.
freedryk 8y ago
This is a totally uncontrolled test. How do they know leads wouldn't have dropped anyways? Without an A/B test you can't draw any firm conclusions from this.
drb91 8y ago
It’s been about a decade since Google provided a decent user experience for search. We really need an alternative.
- Lizzo 8y ago
  http://ddg.gg http://ddg.gg
  - drb91 8y ago
    That mostly offers the same functionality google does. I’d love a search engine that gives users control over ranking, over whether the site runs ads, whether they are a business, whether they’re SEOd out the ass, by security, to blacklist results, to control how they’re displayed. But of course none of these help display ads, so they have no value to companies.
Markoff 8y ago
im surprised this is not banned in EU yet

336 points by krn 8y ago

emayljames 8y ago

Hopefully this one-sided, web damaging framework will die a death like IE finally did, with its awful standards.

setquk 8y ago
Definitely. I can’t understand why the hell anyone would want to use it anyway. The experience is terrible.
- Filligree 8y ago
  It's wonderful when browsing. Pages load in less than half a minute, unlike nearly the entire rest of the internet. Hacker News doesn't need it, but they're nearly unique in having written a good website.
  - zzleeper 8y ago
    I abhor it on mobile. I can't navigate away from it easily, it's hard to copy paste annurl to share with others, etc. I wish Chrome had the option to disable it, but of course they don't.
    - madeofpalk 8y ago
      > I can't navigate away from it easily eh? You can't hit 'back'?
      - tyingq 8y ago
        It does hijack the back button for carousel loaded pages in a way that's odd. Search for some newsworthy word, say "trump". Click a carousel story. Swipe right (another hijack), and the page loads a story from a competitor to the publisher of the original loaded AMP page. Now, hit the back button. One assumes it would go to the original loaded story, right? Nope, it goes back to Google. Surely that wasn't intentional, right?
        grogenaut 8y ago
        Going back to google makes sense as my intention is to read the news of the day, not cross reference. Stack behavior would drive me crazy here.
        tyingq 8y ago
        I suppose, but that sort of reinforces the real purpose of AMP. No publisher in their right mind would give up the top part of their page and enable left/right swipe to navigate to competitors, give up the back button control, etc. It's basically a protection racket. Pay up (in control terms), or get pushed down the search results page. Feels a lot like the old "digg bar" (https://moz.com/ugc/die-diggbar-die-die-should-you-kill-the-digg-bar-on-your-website https://moz.com/ugc/die-diggbar-die-die-should-you-kill-the-...)
        grogenaut 8y ago
        For me though, they already have. I don't browse via their nav. I spearfish articles and I'm out. I find most news sites navigation and search garbage and have to resort to site: searches
        criddell 8y ago
        > No publisher in their right mind would give up the top part of their page and enable left/right swipe to navigate to competitors Publishers usually do not make good decisions. That behavior is for users and (IMHO) it's great.
        notahacker 8y ago
        That behaviour is for Google, not for users.
      - ryanwaggoner 8y ago
        It constantly breaks the back button and screws up my history.
      - AnssiH 8y ago
        They might also mean "go to the non-AMP version", which is my main issue with AMP. I'd like to get the non-AMP page to e.g. see user comments (if any) which are often omitted from the AMP version, or for posting the non-AMP URL to friends or social media. Sometimes there is an easy way to go to non-AMP page, depending on how you got there, but most of the time for me there is not. For example, this article just appeared on my Google feed on my phone, with no way to open the non-AMP version: https://www.vice.com/amp/en_uk/article/wda7jm/where-does-he-get-those-terrible-toys-an-interview-with-ashens-008 https://www.vice.com/amp/en_uk/article/wda7jm/where-does-he-... My preferred option would be to have AMP permanently disabled on my phone.
        freedomben 8y ago
        I couldn't agree more. The problem with AMP is that it isn't possible to disable it. Other than that, I appreciate what Google is trying to do, even if their implementation has a few flaws.
        yorwba 8y ago
        How to disable AMP permanently on your phone: - stop using Google feed. I can't recommend a one-stop replacement, since I use RSS to follow sites I trust to produce high-quality content and HN to discover new stuff. - stop using other Google products that link to AMP pages. DuckDuckGo is good enough these days. - use Firefox. That in itself might prevent Google search from showing AMP results, if you can't bear to use DDG. At least someone said so two years ago in this thread on Google's product forums https://productforums.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=topic/news/ixPneB4vpGk https://productforums.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=t... - install https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/amp2html/ in Firefox. It still needs to load the AMP page to grab the canonical URL, but then it redirects to the non-AMP version. You can also add an adblocker like uBlock Origin while you're at it. The ability to install addons is what makes Firefox the best mobile browser in my opinion.
        emayljames 8y ago
        I just thought of this great Ffox addon that I use too. AMP pages are not real web pages. They are awful.
    - freedomben 8y ago
      I'm agnostic on AMP, but I very much agree with you that they should add the option to disable. Android is all about choice and user empowerment! That's why I love it
      - cronix 8y ago
        > Android is all about choice and user empowerment! I disagree, strongly. I believe Android is really more about keeping you in the Google ecosystem. So is AMP, so is Chrome. I'm an Android user, but let's not pretend they are really about "choice and user empowerment." That's just the sales pitch. Every single thing Google creates is to collect information on/from us, because that's their revenue model. Selling our data. If you disagree, compare the ad revenue from all of them. Who's is miles ahead? Why? How? You're giving them your data. A LOT of it.
        freedomben 8y ago
        Agreed regarding ulterior motives (keeping you in their ecosystem). In the excellent book "In The Plex" by Steven Levy, he talks about Google's motivation of essentially building a browser, mobile OS, etc just to ensure that some other party (like Apple) doesn't cut them out and reduce their search/ad domination. I believe protecting search/ads is at the base of their motives (as is, undeniably, vacuuming up tons of data and mining it for ML purposes). But that said, why do so much for open source? Why not keep big things proprietary? Why sell Chromebooks that can be unlocked, put in dev mode, and flashed with FOSS BIOS implementations? Why allow unlocking the bootloader on Nexus and Pixel phones? There's lots of things they do that clearly aren't for the bottom line or just to trap you in their ecosystem (they do offer versions of basically everything for iOS as well, which makes it easier to switch to iPhone even if you are deep in the Google ecosystem). Some of my argument is emotionally based tho, I will admit. After being trapped in Apple's very proprietary, anti-competitive, you-dont-own-it-we-do system, I find the ability to reclaim some freedom (tho not all, they could do better) very nice. So I think our only real disagreement is likely regarding motives.
        pdkl95 8y ago
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- pacifika 8y ago
  Purely to keep the SEO positioning everyone enjoyed before it came into being.
  - PaulHoule 8y ago
    "Recycling of lost faculties". They take it away from you and then you will bend over and kiss Matt's Butt.
- untog 8y ago
  It isn't though, really. Page load really is nearly instantaneous. I'm no fan of AMP, but I see the reasons why users like it.
  - dep_b 8y ago
    You're right about that, but AMP'ed pages not coming from Google's cache are already really fast. Actually they're only preloading those pages while you're on the results page, which is something they could do as a reward for all pages that have a reduced page weight.
    - lern_too_spel 8y ago
      It is not safe to preload arbitrary web pages. The user will be deanonymized to a site they never visited. It is safe to preload AMP pages by design.
      - manigandham 8y ago
        And yet now you never leave Google's servers when browsing. They know your entire path from search to site and back again.
        lern_too_spel 8y ago
        Google would have known you clicked on the link anyway. You would prefer the publishers and ad networks track users on pages they never even visit?
        manigandham 8y ago
        AMP pages mean Google has 1st party access to your browser no matter what you browse, which is far more than normal. I didn't state any preferences, and how would sites track you on pages you don't visit?
        8y ago
- tyingq 8y ago
  Publishers use it because otherwise their stories don't end up in the carousel widget for Google searches. I don't think many of them are actually buying into the AMP hype. They are just backed into a corner.
  - frandroid 8y ago
    I can confirm this. Source: working at my country's largest newspaper.
- JustSomeNobody 8y ago
  It only takes a couple business to start using it and always winding up at the top of search before everyone else feels they have to like it or not.
- notatoad 8y ago
  So you prefer when pages take >10s to load, have interstitial ads covering the content, and have ads that load in while you scroll, causing the content to jump around on you? I'm pretty happy with amp as an alternative to newspapers' awful websites.
  - cronix 8y ago
    Reader view in firefox makes it very fast. Like how the web used to be. It just displays the images/text of the actual content and strips everything else out. I immediately hit that button on most sites now, and they load in under 1s (usually way under). It even has a dark mode! No videos playing, no ads changing in sidebars distracting your eyes, no popups making your click through. Just the content you wanted to see. I just wish you could make it the default mode.
    - baobrain 8y ago
      Often times the websites are completely broken under reader mode: images are in the wrong locations, image captions are treated as article text, article text doesn't appear on websites that have awful scrolling behaviour. I completely understand why people have problems with AMP. However, AMP is a drop-in replacement (for the user) and Firefox's reader mode is simply not equivalent, as much as I use it.
    - deleted 8y ago
      [deleted]
- tylerl 8y ago
  But not QUITE as terrible as the UX of news sites without AMP. Which I suppose was the point.
GuB-42 8y ago
There are two sides with AMP: - A set of enforced good practices that make sites faster and generally more user friendly - A way for Google to get more control by introducing a semi-proprietary framework The disturbing thing is that webmasters usually criticize the first aspect. Basically they want to bloat their sites and AMP doesn't let them do it. They don't really care about the second part. They are already using Google analytics, Google ads and optimize for Google search anyways. It means that the ones who can do something want AMP to die for all the wrong reasons. For that reason, I think that AMP is good (or less bad). Even better would be to do what AMP does but without the Google framework. That would make it even faster than AMP because there won't be any Google bloat.

xiphias2 8y ago

Front end engineers are not selected for their skills in understanding algorithms and data structures. It's quite easy to speed up a web site if you understand how CPU works on a low level and how Javascript is compiled to machine code, but it requires a lot of knowledge.

walshemj 8y ago
Err you don't need to know how Js is compiled. You need to understand how html css and js work and not cut and paste megabytes of cruft.
mercer 8y ago
Very little knowledge is needed to know how to speed up a website (or keep it from becoming slow). Almost every front-ender I've met, including those who never got beyond inserting jQuery snippets, knows enough.
- walshemj 8y ago
  In 16 plus years of consulting I have had precisely 2 occasions when I found a dev team that knew what they where doing.
  - tyingq 8y ago
    My experience over a similar time period is that most of what appears to be dev team incompetence...isn't. It usually maps to constraints they can't control.
- sureaboutthis 8y ago
  Speeding a site up is one thing. Speeding it up substantially is another and I doubt your example of one who only knows how to insert jQuery snippets knows enough to both understand and implement all the details from server to network to browser.
  - mort96 8y ago

asdfologist 8y ago

As a user I like AMP because it's guaranteed to be very fast. There, I said it.

fatjokes 8y ago
Completely agree as a user.
- PaulHoule 8y ago
  Its fast when it works. On my tablet is a crap shoot if you see any content at all.
tyingq 8y ago
Well sure, Google isn't dumb. Adding in enough benefits (speed, carousel placement) to your Trojan horse ensures there are plausible reasons to bring it into the fort. Publishers certainly wouldn't give up the most important bits of their page (the top), and cede left/right swipe hijacking (on carousel loaded pages) if there weren't some perceived benefit.
- PaulHoule 8y ago
  "Perceived" benefit is the key. It used to be the "World Wide Web" but now it is the "Google Platform" and we just live in it. After Google established that useful web search was possible the realized that the #1 competitor for their ads was organic rankings, and if you could really get a #1 ranking by investing in the best content then why would you spend money on ads? So since then it is has been about deliberately degrading the search results so you learn to look at the ads instead, giving people bad S.E.O. advice, etc.
  - izacus 8y ago
    Your conspirancy theory completely ignores the whole shitshow of 15MB+ textual websites we've had to endure in those last years.

franze 8y ago

the easiest way to get rid of AMP pages is rolling out an !important; in the AMP CSS - so invalidating the AMP pages. wait until they are kicked out from the google cache (see your trusted google search console, best the useable old one). then remove the references to the AMP page from the non-AMP pages. then delete the AMPs. usually takes 2 to 3 days for a few thousand pages.

izacus 8y ago

What exactly are "leads" in this context?

tyingq 8y ago
The article heavily implies sales leads...collected email addresses to try and convert into sales. They sell managed wordpress hosting. However, their site doesn't appear to have much in terms of collecting leads. No newsletters, no trial accounts, etc. They just have paid plans you can sign up for. I guess the "contact us" page could be considered a lead generator. So, I'm as confused as you are. Lead generation would be pretty bad if you don't collect leads :)

amelius 8y ago

A company trying to hijack the web is not a good idea.

soared 8y ago

> Could we have done more conversion rate optimization to our AMP install? Probably yes. There are ways to add CTAs, newsletter signups, etc If I'm reading this correctly they switched from regular pages with CTAs to AMP pages without CTAs. Seemingly this test was designed to fail.

privateSFacct 8y ago

Here's the reality. The Taboola news carousals at the bottom of most slow loading actual news sites are filled with total junk. One page per image websites, super slow, adblock goes crazy. I've literally NEVER had a good experience with these "Stories you may like" Google does something with a news carousel that loads fast and the content isn't crap. I get why publishers running things like taboola think it's terrible, but as a user interested in reading some quick news without going blind, I like it. Hacker news is the exception in terms of a quick loading / clean website. I was a google reader user heavily - so I like the more stripped down view of things even if it's "terrible". One other note about this study. This company's goal is not to educate but to sign up users. At least for myself, Folks who want / like a stripped down experience may just be less interested in being marketed to.

lol768 8y ago
> The Taboola news carousals at the bottom of most slow loading actual news sites are filled with total junk. This, a thousands times. For both Taboola and Outbrain it's clickbaity trash - usually misleading and low quality content. They're designed to "disrupt" so that people click on them and have in the past featured on blatantly false news stories. I'd honestly be ashamed to work at one of these sort of organisations and it further underlines how awful the web experience can be if you're not using an ad blocker. It's no surprise to me that AMP is popular among users if news sites are not including such garbage in their AMP renditions.
- freditup 8y ago
  It's interesting that so many people would enjoy AMP, because on my Android, viewing AMP sites in Google's main app often feels much slower than regular web browsing in Firefox for Android. The difference? I have an ad-blocker in Firefox, but not in Google's app. So Ad-blocking > AMP > Regular (as far as user-experience from a speed perspective). Obviously Google has a lot of incentive to make sure people don't go the ad-blocking route. Though not sure what is keeping ad-blocking from growing given its superiority - likely just a lack of awareness about the option. If ad-blocking ever did grow massively though, the internet would change in ways we haven't yet seen. Either ad-serving companies would win the arms battle and ad-blockers would become ineffective, or, the web would have to move to a new payment model (Brave-like perhaps). I'm not entirely sure what the ideal is - likely a model where users can choose between ads or micropayments is the most pragmatic world.

krn 8y ago

I think that AMP made Google's search results feel like they were essentially just Google's own pages. Because that's exactly what the user sees in his address bar, when he visits an accelerated mobile page: google.com/amp/<...>. And that encourages him to hit "Back" as soon as he is done with it, instead of checking out the newly discovered website. Because he never felt like he had discovered anything. He never felt that he had left Google. The fact, that there are no AMP pages in Google's search results on Firefox Mobile, was the final reason for me to make the switch. I feel like I am browsing the world wide web again, not just a Google's snapshot of it.

zavi 8y ago
Users don't see google.com, they see shittypopups.com delivered by Google

sixtypoundhound 8y ago

So another problem with AMP delivered via Google is it tends to utterly booger your analytics... first pageview (via the Google cache) is viewed as a different domain than your site. This can play havoc with optimization efforts. In terms of performance... this is a situation where the AVERAGE AMP site is much faster than the AVERAGE site not using AMP... but that's a rigged game given the volume of non-optimized WordPress junk and god-knows-what coming from the typical advertising server (images, video, scripts). A well-optimized site run by knowledgeable and balanced adults will see a moderate improvement in speed; this is assuming you leaned out the pages already and kept the advertising cruft on a short leash. You can generally beat AMP's load times with some elbow grease.

ec109685 8y ago
You can’t beat its load times. Google pre-renders the web page before the user clicks, which isn’t safe to do with pages created by your own elbow grease.
- drb91 8y ago
  Load times ain’t everything, and it’s a terrible pitch for something that breaks basic rules of browsing.
  - ec109685 8y ago
    This post was specifically saying you could beat AMP’s load times. That isn’t possible.
- sixtypoundhound 8y ago
  You can actually.... with very, very lean design....
  - ec109685 8y ago
    Nope. You can’t best the speed of light.

erikb 8y ago

I have experienced AMP only from the user perspective and always hated it since day one. Until now I don't really understand where it came from and why people would willingly enable it on their site. The first thing I do when I see it is consider whether to go somewhere else or open the actual underlying link. It already sounds toxic. Instead of loading your page suddenly I load a google wrapper that includes some parts of your page. Doesn't that sound like a red flags for anybody? Does it sound less toxic if I call it "free and open google wrapper build on existing technologies"?

lpasselin 8y ago

The analysis on the google analytics data seems a bit biased against AMP. - decrease in average positions in SERPs on mobile - decrease in CTR on mobile - higher number of impressions - slight increase in total clicks These measures are correlated. You can't just add them all together. More impressions with the same amount of clicks means CTR (click through rate) will drop. Average position should also drop. In this case we see a slight increase in total clicks and almost double impressions! What if adding AMP makes Google show your site to a wider range of audience (more variance on target audience), while assigning your pages a lower weight (average position). You would get this behaviour. Lower average position but more clicks. This could lower your account creation and similar metrics because users are less interested. What I mean is for some websites, getting more clicks would be great. If your total clicks is the goal, you would like these results (ex: page with ads). For search users, this is not good because we are shown pages that are less relevant. I would like more explanations on mobile leads, account creation, and newsletter email sign-ups dropped. Why not show plots? Are these compared to total from previous months or percentages? We should also need to be able to compare both websites (mobile vs AMP) to see if there are any major differences. I am not an SEO expert or web designer but I personally use AMP on my modest website. I don't even have a desktop version. Only AMP. It is simpler that way and took only an afternoon (for a css noob) to switch. What made me switch was their amp-img carousel lightbox. They are simple to use and just work. I tried a plethora of css/js carousel or album viewers and chose AMP. Bonus page speed and better mobile search cards.

le205 8y ago
Very much agree with this comment. It’s quite likely that the AMP pages received incremental impressions in lower positions, which reduced the overall average position but increased clicks. The screenshot of rankings from another tool (looks like Accuranker) with a few +1 ranking improvements after disabling AMP also seems insignificant. Often this kind of fluctuation is very normal. Without knowing the baseline level of ranking fluctuation, it’s hard to read too much into this. This is the danger of analysing ‘totals’ without segmentation to better track incrementality. Any test needs to be properly controlled to form clear conclusions and I don’t see enough rigor here. I would however commend the article on its advice to avoid simply ‘disabling’ AMP after using it for a period of time. There is cleanup to be done as the article touches on, and I suspect many may not be aware.

gwern 8y ago

> Our mobile leads dropped by 59.09%. Our newsletter email sign-ups from mobile dropped by 16.67%. Our account creations from mobile devices dropped 10.53%. What happened to total leads/signups/creations?

jaredcwhite 8y ago

Over and over again I'll click a link from Twitter or elsewhere, and in mere moments I'm thinking to myself…waaait a sec, is this another crappy AMP page? It never looks right. It's always "off" in some weird (and sometimes very obvious) way. Nearly every time I go to the real page on the real website, it looks better and functions better. Since I use an ad blocker, it's never a problem for me that the real site might want to load heavier ads on mobile. AMP is a plague on the open web. It's offensive, I never request it, and it never solves any problem for me. I'm glad I use DuckDuckGo as my search engine so I never get kicked to AMP pages from search. As a web developer, I've vowed never to implement AMP on any of my client sites and will explain to my clients why if asked (and so far I've never been asked). Just say no to AMP.

emayljames 8y ago
You have hit the nail on the head with this explanation. Just.Say.No!

Rjevski 8y ago

I don’t like AMP, but I am so happy to see when websites complain that “leads dropped by 59%” because of it. For “leads” to drop that much it must mean they weren’t legitimate, happy leads in the first place. I bet those “leads” came from a shit letter popup or other similar dark pattern, in which case AMP works as designed and benefits the user by shielding them from such garbage. AMP is bad for the web in the long term. But it is a decent stop-gap solution given that nobody is willing to make their websites bearable without Google’s pressure. EDIT: I just tried their website again without an ad blocker and sure enough, I was asked to subscribe to their shitletter.

codazoda 8y ago
I'm also an Amp hater and welcomed this news. Then, I went to the site. Because I really hate AMP I dismissed all three of their mobile pop ups; one after another. After reading the article I tried to use the back button to go back to hacker news; took three clicks (maybe one for each popup)? I'm guessing you are correct and they need to take another look for causation.
kentt 8y ago
Agreed. However, I'm more in favour of AMP because if the reasons you mentioned. Essentially I think Google has tricked a lot of publishers into using less dark patterns and avoiding shooting themselves in the foot with heavy ads and tracking. It's not perfect but from an end user perspective I'm grateful for it.
- ehsankia 8y ago
  It's also important to note that AMP isn't meant to be used for every site out there. It's only useful for specific sites that have a static landing pages. I still don't understand why sites like reddit use it either.
  - ivanfon 8y ago
    The SEO incentives are likely enough to make any and all types of websites interested in using it.

jchw 8y ago

Please don't turn off AMP actually. Do I really want to sign up for your dumb site's newsletter, or get push notifications? Well, so far I've wanted to do that Literally Zero times in the past, so I'm gonna bet on no.

abalone 8y ago

They don’t actually say why they think leads declined. They list a few reasons why they think it didn’t increase, e.g. they’re already fast on mobile. But they don’t explain a 59% drop in leads. Crucially they note that impressions and clicks actually increased with AMP. That points to an unflattering explanation: the AMP format is blocking techniques they use to turn clicks into leads. So why don’t they discuss the reasons for the drop? Perhaps because they know those techniques are user hostile.

freedryk 8y ago

This is a totally uncontrolled test. How do they know leads wouldn't have dropped anyways? Without an A/B test you can't draw any firm conclusions from this.

drb91 8y ago

It’s been about a decade since Google provided a decent user experience for search. We really need an alternative.

Lizzo 8y ago
http://ddg.gg http://ddg.gg
- drb91 8y ago
  That mostly offers the same functionality google does. I’d love a search engine that gives users control over ranking, over whether the site runs ads, whether they are a business, whether they’re SEOd out the ass, by security, to blacklist results, to control how they’re displayed. But of course none of these help display ads, so they have no value to companies.

Markoff 8y ago

im surprised this is not banned in EU yet