I don't think the fact everyone is adopting them makes it not a fad. People have jumped on a lot of fads over the years. Hell, even animated gifs are losing a l

I don't think the fact everyone is adopting them makes it not a fad. People have jumped on a lot of fads over the years. Hell, even animated gifs are losing a lot of popularity now; can you imagine thinking that 10y ago? More importantly, this is still driven by one or two big players using this format. If those players decide to innovate with the format, it could radically alter how people feel about it and it could lose in popularity, or it could change enough that Google's implementation becomes irrelevant unless they alter it significantly as well (which then gives more work downstream, which could make publishers stop bothering with it if they ever did). This feels super fragile and tbh looks more like a desperate play from Google than an adoptive one. In fact, you know what an adoptive one would look like to me? Having google start seriously indexing stories and be able to show them in rich media results. I think the difference is: one approach is ad driven, one is search driven.