37 ms·

I worked on amp for a leading newspaper, and everyone who says that amp is about "making the web faster on mobile" is either very naive or doing marketing for g

by soyyo 7y ago

I worked on amp for a leading newspaper, and everyone who says that amp is about "making the web faster on mobile" is either very naive or doing marketing for google. For publishers, amp is about trying to top the results on google search and capture traffic, it's their only motivation to publish their content using amp, and the only metric they look in order to evaluate the results. Once they have their amp content, they will look how to load it with ads and tracking, which very conveniently is supported on amp, just as they do in their regular sites. So the "fast" part, besides using their CDN, actually comes from limiting what you can do on almost every other part of the site, you can only do the stuff that is packed in the amp components controlled by google, which in practice means that google controls the web behavior.

mrtksn 7y ago
Serious question: what else those websites are supposed to do (that AMP does not provide) with all those megabytes of scripts? Newspapers display a text and an image and very rarely an interactive content(Election day maps and charts, mostly). Is there a reason FROM USERS PERSPECTIVE to have different website codebase for each publisher? For years the Web community kept creating new JavaScript libraries every day and all these web libraries were about providing a different way to do the same thing. No one ever created anything for the users, in fact, AMP is the first web technology that improves the user experience. It's loading fast and not too much stuff happens to display a text and an image. Web people are mad at Google and I think they should be but all this happens because the web publishers refuse to compete on User Experience. They all optimize for the clickbitiest title or controversial topic and Google came and steamrolled their publishing tech. I can't really blame Google for this one, you can check it out - I am critical of Google but I am more critical of the news business or the web tech community that optimized for very bad KPI that destroyed democracy, made web unpleasant and are now crying because of someone demolished their low-quality business. From USERS PERSPECTIVE, AMP is a godsend. You can quickly view and skim low-quality content. The alternative is slowly viewing and skimming low-quality content. It seems like the web technologists are unaware that they are dealing with real human beings, optimizing blindly for page views and CPMs. AMP is Youtube for written content. A strealined conent delivery platform prioritizing UX that the publishers failed to create themselves all these years.
- buboard 7y ago
  from USERS PERSPECTIVE, amp is meh. yes it's faster, does it really matter if you re getting an article in 1 second when you -obviously- plan to spend 2 minutes reading it? i dont know anyone who thinks so, perhaps your USERS do > A strealined conent delivery platform prioritizing UX that the publishers failed to create what you re implying is, Google failed to improve their algorithms to bypass obvious SEOs, so they are forcing everyone to use a dumbed down platform that is harder to SEO - for now!
  - mrtksn 7y ago
    Actually, it's a pretty well-known fact that users leave websites if they are not loading fast. People don't go with reading plans to websites, the titles are optimized to bring you there and you don't know what's in the article. More often than not, the text on the website is not what the title made you believe it is. You can't plan ahead, you want to quickly find out what is this all about. The article themselves are usually garbage optimized for SEO, long paragraphs of sentences that say the same thing but with different keywords. If that's not enough, they try to sway attention with ads and popups. Even if you had a plan about reading an article, the publisher's plan about you is different(tip: it's not about letting you read in peace). The Web is horrible, it's even more horrible on mobile. AMP is an improvement.
    - buboard 7y ago
      > users leave websites if they are not loading fast then google is doing a bad job of presenting these sites to users, since obviously these sites should lose their rank, since users leave them. Google surely thinks bounce rates are important, no? > The article themselves are usually garbage optimized for SEO, long paragraphs of sentences and how is AMP fixing this? and who is responsible for SEO having these incentives? SEO literally means they optimize for what google wants
      - mrtksn 7y ago
        They do lose ranks[0]. AMP is fixing this because you can take a peek into the content almost instantaneously so you can just see what is this all about and leave. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/07/search-ads-speed https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/07/search-ads...
bytematic 7y ago
Exactly, use google amp and get higher rankings and it can increase your traffic by hundreds to thousands to millions. I hate it but its how it works
- superkuh 7y ago
  Higher rankings and google will preload the amp page they have and their servers for the amp link. That's why it is a tiny bit faster. It has nothing to do with the amp spec itself. It's faster because google is abusing it's monopoly search position to pre-load.
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    > google is abusing it's monopoly search position to pre-load. How is that abusing their monopoly search position? Abusing their monopoly search position would be making publishers integrate directly with them to enable preload, like Apple News. Instead, they ask publishers to serve documents that can safely be prerendered, and all their competitors get to (and do!) consume those documents as well to enable safe prerendering from their own sites.
    - stephenr 7y ago
      Without their monopoly search position no one would be forced to adopt amp and further strengthen said monopoly position.
      - joshuamorton 7y ago
        How does amp strengthen a monopoly position?
        stephenr 7y ago
        It strengthens googles control over the web.
emodendroket 7y ago
No, I'm well aware that that's what it's "about," just like I'm well aware that the search engine is mainly about advertising. I just don't care what it's about so long as the results are beneficial to me -- which they definitely are. When I see the AMP icon I know the page is going to load much faster
- pixl97 7y ago
  Always question what long term loss you are taking for these short term gains.
  - vkou 7y ago
    The long term loss for short term gains that we're already dealing with has been the page bloat over the past decade. AMP is the solution to that long-term loss. It's not the best possible solution, but it's the best that we currently have. Prior to AMP, the web didn't give a rat's ass about performance.
  - mrtksn 7y ago
    Are we going to lose high-quality paid by the reader content? Probably not, because that already happened to the newspapers. They were replaced by the "get a view at any cost, track the user through all means possible, it's all about eyeballs on ads" folks and now they are warning us that they might be next and we, the readers, should decline reading the low quality fast.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    I really wish content servers considered that before letting all their sites become ad laden wastelands. The web infrastructure we have today can respond to pages blindly fast if proper optimization is done, bloated front end frameworks and malvertising counter all of that to draw it down to molasses speeds - and the "I want to server my stuff to my users" argument is only valid if it's to extracting ad revenue from them - I think it's just time to reeducate people on the fact that ads may subsidize content but they can't fully sponsor it outside of niche situations.
  - emodendroket 7y ago
brentonator 7y ago
I invite you to go to your local Fox/ABC/CBS channel's website and TRY to read an article vs AMP. AMP is about stopping....that. It's indescribable how horrible these companies have become. 1. Auto-playing ads 2. Scroll-jacking 3. Overlay...after overlay... after overlay. 4. Popover 5. Paywall 6. Popover again for good taste. 7. Oops you scrolled too far better redirect you to another page entirely. 8. You wanted the video version of this article right? Better force you to read the article in 20% of the screen so all of our ads, bars, and video can fit on the page.
- tyingq 7y ago
  Google is capable of driving SERP and carousel position based on the performance of the site. They don't need AMP for that. AMP is very much about creating an semi-walled garden. Any performance benefit is the lovely exterior of the Trojan horse.
  - deleted 7y ago
    [deleted]
  - bduerst 7y ago
    And has been. Look at how well that worked for mobile web.
    - tyingq 7y ago
      Sorry, "has been" what? You mean Google is using performance, in a meaningful way, to drive SERP and Carousel placement? If so, I disagree. They talk about it. They don't do it in a way that drives behaviour. They could. A significant drop plus a webmaster tools message that says why, would work.
- privateSFacct 7y ago
  No kidding Despite all the claims that AMP is only faster because of preload, if you actually look at these HTML sites on big news orgs they are MONSTROSITIES. Check out dev tools, the number of network requests is wild. The page is so insanely dynamic do old / slow computers even run it well? From script size to dome/paint reflows etc etc to third party javascript having total access to your page - much of that is limited with AMP. I think third party javascript is forced into an iframe sandbox, can only be async with a web worker, limited in size acrosss ALL scripts etc.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
lern_too_spel 7y ago
AMP is fast because it prerenders. That is the main point of AMP, and you seemingly don't understand it after working on it. It amazes me how little developers understand their platforms these days.
- tyingq 7y ago
  You may consider that we do understand pre-render, but don't like the trade-off involved. A full on AOL style walled garden could be even faster. It could mandate brotli, force a common css base, only offer one kind of ad platform, etc. Should we go there?
  - lern_too_spel 7y ago
    The person I was responding to said that AMP was fast for a reason other than prerendering. That's wrong. Prerendering is the main point of AMP, which is what I pointed out in my comment. A full AOL style walled garden is what Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles are. AMP enables the same speed in a way that any link aggregator can take advantage of without having to strike deals with individual publishers.
    - tyingq 7y ago
      I agree with your literal statements, but Google does abuse AMP. The way they hijack left/right swipe and the back button for carousel loaded pages is ample evidence for me. It's very clearly not my content any more when you steal the top X pixels and hijack user interactions. AMP also requires I include a Google owned and controlled piece of JavaScript that they can change at any time. That's literally in the "standard". In fact, a bad update borked all AMP pages for quite a while some time ago.
      - lern_too_spel 7y ago
        > The way they hijack left/right swipe and the back button for carousel loaded pages This doesn't happen for me on any of my Android browsers. The problem is likely with your browser. I wouldn't be surprised if Chrome on iOS is buggy just like every other browser available for iOS. > AMP also requires I include a Google owned and controlled piece of JavaScript that they can change at any time If you don't want your page to load instantly from Google, Bing, and other link aggregators, don't use it. Same with Apple News, which has more ornery integration requirements. I, as a user, will simply skip over your links to find faster ones. If you don't give users what they want, what do you expect will happen?
noelsusman 7y ago
Of course AMP has other motives than simply making the web faster for mobile, but it also does make the web faster for mobile. I guarantee the AMP version of that paper's mobile website provided a significantly better user experience than the normal version. That is why AMP has been successful, and it's why I will continue to click on AMP links whenever available. Is giving Google that much control ideal? Of course not, but from a user perspective it's a hell of a lot better than the alternative.
- stephenr 7y ago
  Install a content blocker, and the original site sans bullshit is the best experience. Ironically the amp page is artificially slow when blocking amp’s JS because they force an 8 second delay - via required boilerplate css - before content is visible.
  - wizzwizz4 7y ago
    Source for your second paragraph: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16730905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16730905 That's out of date now, though; despite still being part of the required boilerplate CSS for AMP pages, I can't find that delay in any of the https://amp.dev/ https://amp.dev/ pages (the ampbyexample.com replacement demo site). This is really shady.
    - joshuamorton 7y ago
      It's a little more complex than that: If you disable all js, there is no delay. If you specifically block amp js, there is a delay. There could certainly be a shady reason for this, but the justification makes sense: one of the goals of AMP is to have, basically, a single, correct, initial paint. That's why images are statically sized and amp sticks placeholders there until the real images load. The js delay exists to allow the site to fetch the js and use it to correctly render the initial paint, even on a slow/flaky connection where the js takes a bit to fetch.
      - deleted 7y ago
privateSFacct 7y ago
If you work for a media org - than you KNOW that on the non-amp pages the synchronous java script from a hundred tracking / ad platforms (why can't these sites just use ONE tracking library) CRUSH the page load times. Despite your (false) claim that google support sync javascript ad libraries "just as they do in their regular sites" this is 100% false. The amp javascript components have DOM interaction restrictions, file size restrictions, response restrictions, can't run sync etc. for amp-ad "No ad network-provided JavaScript is allowed to run inside the AMP document. Instead, the AMP runtime loads an iframe from a different origin (via iframe sandbox) as the AMP document and executes the ad network’s JS inside that iframe sandbox." If you can't understand why some of these steps result in both a faster site and one that is more secure I can't help you, but please stop with the misinformation here.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- buboard 7y ago
  amp-ads moves those ads/trackers in iframes, but that doesn't reduce the code size, right? google is also injecting code in your site , so you can't be sure that it's secure / private, right? And if i promise to make all ads async and iframe, will google promise to rank my site higher? If not , they are discriminating in favor of their own walled garden system without an objective ruse.
  - liveoneggs 7y ago
    really? adsense forbids use of iframes afaik
    - buboard 7y ago
      they offer replacements as amp-ads. i dont know how they work
    - underdown 7y ago
      Many ads are served via iframes https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/183282 https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/183282
s17n 7y ago
> So the "fast" part, besides using their CDN, actually comes from limiting what you can do on almost every other part of the site That is a good thing.
827djdjs6 7y ago
Those poor publishers, really makes me miss the early 2010s internet.

by soyyo 7y ago

mrtksn 7y ago

Serious question: what else those websites are supposed to do (that AMP does not provide) with all those megabytes of scripts? Newspapers display a text and an image and very rarely an interactive content(Election day maps and charts, mostly). Is there a reason FROM USERS PERSPECTIVE to have different website codebase for each publisher? For years the Web community kept creating new JavaScript libraries every day and all these web libraries were about providing a different way to do the same thing. No one ever created anything for the users, in fact, AMP is the first web technology that improves the user experience. It's loading fast and not too much stuff happens to display a text and an image. Web people are mad at Google and I think they should be but all this happens because the web publishers refuse to compete on User Experience. They all optimize for the clickbitiest title or controversial topic and Google came and steamrolled their publishing tech. I can't really blame Google for this one, you can check it out - I am critical of Google but I am more critical of the news business or the web tech community that optimized for very bad KPI that destroyed democracy, made web unpleasant and are now crying because of someone demolished their low-quality business. From USERS PERSPECTIVE, AMP is a godsend. You can quickly view and skim low-quality content. The alternative is slowly viewing and skimming low-quality content. It seems like the web technologists are unaware that they are dealing with real human beings, optimizing blindly for page views and CPMs. AMP is Youtube for written content. A strealined conent delivery platform prioritizing UX that the publishers failed to create themselves all these years.

buboard 7y ago
from USERS PERSPECTIVE, amp is meh. yes it's faster, does it really matter if you re getting an article in 1 second when you -obviously- plan to spend 2 minutes reading it? i dont know anyone who thinks so, perhaps your USERS do > A strealined conent delivery platform prioritizing UX that the publishers failed to create what you re implying is, Google failed to improve their algorithms to bypass obvious SEOs, so they are forcing everyone to use a dumbed down platform that is harder to SEO - for now!
- mrtksn 7y ago
  Actually, it's a pretty well-known fact that users leave websites if they are not loading fast. People don't go with reading plans to websites, the titles are optimized to bring you there and you don't know what's in the article. More often than not, the text on the website is not what the title made you believe it is. You can't plan ahead, you want to quickly find out what is this all about. The article themselves are usually garbage optimized for SEO, long paragraphs of sentences that say the same thing but with different keywords. If that's not enough, they try to sway attention with ads and popups. Even if you had a plan about reading an article, the publisher's plan about you is different(tip: it's not about letting you read in peace). The Web is horrible, it's even more horrible on mobile. AMP is an improvement.
  - buboard 7y ago
    > users leave websites if they are not loading fast then google is doing a bad job of presenting these sites to users, since obviously these sites should lose their rank, since users leave them. Google surely thinks bounce rates are important, no? > The article themselves are usually garbage optimized for SEO, long paragraphs of sentences and how is AMP fixing this? and who is responsible for SEO having these incentives? SEO literally means they optimize for what google wants
    - mrtksn 7y ago
      They do lose ranks[0]. AMP is fixing this because you can take a peek into the content almost instantaneously so you can just see what is this all about and leave. https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/07/search-ads-speed https://developers.google.com/web/updates/2018/07/search-ads...

bytematic 7y ago

Exactly, use google amp and get higher rankings and it can increase your traffic by hundreds to thousands to millions. I hate it but its how it works

superkuh 7y ago
Higher rankings and google will preload the amp page they have and their servers for the amp link. That's why it is a tiny bit faster. It has nothing to do with the amp spec itself. It's faster because google is abusing it's monopoly search position to pre-load.
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  > google is abusing it's monopoly search position to pre-load. How is that abusing their monopoly search position? Abusing their monopoly search position would be making publishers integrate directly with them to enable preload, like Apple News. Instead, they ask publishers to serve documents that can safely be prerendered, and all their competitors get to (and do!) consume those documents as well to enable safe prerendering from their own sites.
  - stephenr 7y ago
    Without their monopoly search position no one would be forced to adopt amp and further strengthen said monopoly position.
    - joshuamorton 7y ago
      How does amp strengthen a monopoly position?
      - stephenr 7y ago
        It strengthens googles control over the web.

emodendroket 7y ago

No, I'm well aware that that's what it's "about," just like I'm well aware that the search engine is mainly about advertising. I just don't care what it's about so long as the results are beneficial to me -- which they definitely are. When I see the AMP icon I know the page is going to load much faster

pixl97 7y ago
Always question what long term loss you are taking for these short term gains.
- vkou 7y ago
  The long term loss for short term gains that we're already dealing with has been the page bloat over the past decade. AMP is the solution to that long-term loss. It's not the best possible solution, but it's the best that we currently have. Prior to AMP, the web didn't give a rat's ass about performance.
- mrtksn 7y ago
  Are we going to lose high-quality paid by the reader content? Probably not, because that already happened to the newspapers. They were replaced by the "get a view at any cost, track the user through all means possible, it's all about eyeballs on ads" folks and now they are warning us that they might be next and we, the readers, should decline reading the low quality fast.
- munk-a 7y ago
  I really wish content servers considered that before letting all their sites become ad laden wastelands. The web infrastructure we have today can respond to pages blindly fast if proper optimization is done, bloated front end frameworks and malvertising counter all of that to draw it down to molasses speeds - and the "I want to server my stuff to my users" argument is only valid if it's to extracting ad revenue from them - I think it's just time to reeducate people on the fact that ads may subsidize content but they can't fully sponsor it outside of niche situations.
- emodendroket 7y ago

brentonator 7y ago

I invite you to go to your local Fox/ABC/CBS channel's website and TRY to read an article vs AMP. AMP is about stopping....that. It's indescribable how horrible these companies have become. 1. Auto-playing ads 2. Scroll-jacking 3. Overlay...after overlay... after overlay. 4. Popover 5. Paywall 6. Popover again for good taste. 7. Oops you scrolled too far better redirect you to another page entirely. 8. You wanted the video version of this article right? Better force you to read the article in 20% of the screen so all of our ads, bars, and video can fit on the page.

tyingq 7y ago
Google is capable of driving SERP and carousel position based on the performance of the site. They don't need AMP for that. AMP is very much about creating an semi-walled garden. Any performance benefit is the lovely exterior of the Trojan horse.
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
- bduerst 7y ago
  And has been. Look at how well that worked for mobile web.
  - tyingq 7y ago
    Sorry, "has been" what? You mean Google is using performance, in a meaningful way, to drive SERP and Carousel placement? If so, I disagree. They talk about it. They don't do it in a way that drives behaviour. They could. A significant drop plus a webmaster tools message that says why, would work.
privateSFacct 7y ago
No kidding Despite all the claims that AMP is only faster because of preload, if you actually look at these HTML sites on big news orgs they are MONSTROSITIES. Check out dev tools, the number of network requests is wild. The page is so insanely dynamic do old / slow computers even run it well? From script size to dome/paint reflows etc etc to third party javascript having total access to your page - much of that is limited with AMP. I think third party javascript is forced into an iframe sandbox, can only be async with a web worker, limited in size acrosss ALL scripts etc.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

lern_too_spel 7y ago

AMP is fast because it prerenders. That is the main point of AMP, and you seemingly don't understand it after working on it. It amazes me how little developers understand their platforms these days.

tyingq 7y ago
You may consider that we do understand pre-render, but don't like the trade-off involved. A full on AOL style walled garden could be even faster. It could mandate brotli, force a common css base, only offer one kind of ad platform, etc. Should we go there?
- lern_too_spel 7y ago
  The person I was responding to said that AMP was fast for a reason other than prerendering. That's wrong. Prerendering is the main point of AMP, which is what I pointed out in my comment. A full AOL style walled garden is what Apple News and Facebook Instant Articles are. AMP enables the same speed in a way that any link aggregator can take advantage of without having to strike deals with individual publishers.
  - tyingq 7y ago
    I agree with your literal statements, but Google does abuse AMP. The way they hijack left/right swipe and the back button for carousel loaded pages is ample evidence for me. It's very clearly not my content any more when you steal the top X pixels and hijack user interactions. AMP also requires I include a Google owned and controlled piece of JavaScript that they can change at any time. That's literally in the "standard". In fact, a bad update borked all AMP pages for quite a while some time ago.
    - lern_too_spel 7y ago
      > The way they hijack left/right swipe and the back button for carousel loaded pages This doesn't happen for me on any of my Android browsers. The problem is likely with your browser. I wouldn't be surprised if Chrome on iOS is buggy just like every other browser available for iOS. > AMP also requires I include a Google owned and controlled piece of JavaScript that they can change at any time If you don't want your page to load instantly from Google, Bing, and other link aggregators, don't use it. Same with Apple News, which has more ornery integration requirements. I, as a user, will simply skip over your links to find faster ones. If you don't give users what they want, what do you expect will happen?

noelsusman 7y ago

Of course AMP has other motives than simply making the web faster for mobile, but it also does make the web faster for mobile. I guarantee the AMP version of that paper's mobile website provided a significantly better user experience than the normal version. That is why AMP has been successful, and it's why I will continue to click on AMP links whenever available. Is giving Google that much control ideal? Of course not, but from a user perspective it's a hell of a lot better than the alternative.

stephenr 7y ago
Install a content blocker, and the original site sans bullshit is the best experience. Ironically the amp page is artificially slow when blocking amp’s JS because they force an 8 second delay - via required boilerplate css - before content is visible.
- wizzwizz4 7y ago
  Source for your second paragraph: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16730905 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16730905 That's out of date now, though; despite still being part of the required boilerplate CSS for AMP pages, I can't find that delay in any of the https://amp.dev/ https://amp.dev/ pages (the ampbyexample.com replacement demo site). This is really shady.
  - joshuamorton 7y ago
    It's a little more complex than that: If you disable all js, there is no delay. If you specifically block amp js, there is a delay. There could certainly be a shady reason for this, but the justification makes sense: one of the goals of AMP is to have, basically, a single, correct, initial paint. That's why images are statically sized and amp sticks placeholders there until the real images load. The js delay exists to allow the site to fetch the js and use it to correctly render the initial paint, even on a slow/flaky connection where the js takes a bit to fetch.
    - deleted 7y ago

privateSFacct 7y ago

If you work for a media org - than you KNOW that on the non-amp pages the synchronous java script from a hundred tracking / ad platforms (why can't these sites just use ONE tracking library) CRUSH the page load times. Despite your (false) claim that google support sync javascript ad libraries "just as they do in their regular sites" this is 100% false. The amp javascript components have DOM interaction restrictions, file size restrictions, response restrictions, can't run sync etc. for amp-ad "No ad network-provided JavaScript is allowed to run inside the AMP document. Instead, the AMP runtime loads an iframe from a different origin (via iframe sandbox) as the AMP document and executes the ad network’s JS inside that iframe sandbox." If you can't understand why some of these steps result in both a faster site and one that is more secure I can't help you, but please stop with the misinformation here.

deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
buboard 7y ago
amp-ads moves those ads/trackers in iframes, but that doesn't reduce the code size, right? google is also injecting code in your site , so you can't be sure that it's secure / private, right? And if i promise to make all ads async and iframe, will google promise to rank my site higher? If not , they are discriminating in favor of their own walled garden system without an objective ruse.
- liveoneggs 7y ago
  really? adsense forbids use of iframes afaik
  - buboard 7y ago
    they offer replacements as amp-ads. i dont know how they work
  - underdown 7y ago
    Many ads are served via iframes https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/183282 https://support.google.com/admanager/answer/183282

s17n 7y ago

> So the "fast" part, besides using their CDN, actually comes from limiting what you can do on almost every other part of the site That is a good thing.

827djdjs6 7y ago

Those poor publishers, really makes me miss the early 2010s internet.