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AMP Has Irreparably Damaged Publishers’ Trust in Google-Led Initiatives
- nokya 5y agoMy trust in AMP can be summarized as the "ampproject.org" one liner in my proxy blacklist.
- EastOfTruth 5y agoI've been seeing a lot less AMP URLs but I still see about 1 per week...
- CameronNemo 5y agoI've been seeing more apple.news URLs.
- spideymans 5y agoWhere do you find apple.news links on the web? Or are they being sent to you by people? Not being argumentative, I’ve just never came across a link to an Apple News article.
- CameronNemo 5y agoBeing sent them, yeah.
- EastOfTruth 5y agoI don't see them posted on Reddit or HN... (at least not in the top posts)
- lern_too_spel 5y agoThe author seems to not understand AMP at all. AMP ads on AMP pages get to render instantly because they are prerendered and only trigger impressions when they are viewed. Non-AMP pages aren't prerendered because they would count as an impression even if they aren't viewed. You could call that a "nice comparative boost," but there is nothing sinister about that. https://amp.dev/about/ads/ https://amp.dev/about/ads/ I don't even work on the web professionally, and even I can figure this stuff out. It's really not that hard.
- throwaway2048 5y agoAMP literally has a built in 1 second delay to render outside of Google, non AMP content, that is the "Nice comparative boost". It has nothing to do with "pre rendering" its built right into the CSS.
- cerved 5y agohow is this done in CSS?
- DocTomoe 5y agoI think there is confusion about the term "rendering" here. The term "rendering" is used (a) to describe the actual translation of textual-instructive HTML/CSS/Javascript into a graphical representation within a browser window and (b) to describe stuff being loaded into a page via Javascript, most prominently ads, and more oriented towards load time ("How long until the page has finished loading" = "rendering time"). With CSS, you can define pixel-perfect areas for stuff to be rendered into, which makes the browser not having to decide on the size of the area after it has loaded further material from third-party sources. Doing so reduces "screen flickering", which is generally annoying (and the major reason why I block ads with a vengeance). This can be described as "pre-rendering" when you understand rendering as (a).
- MichaelJanssen 5y agoAMP sites have a 8 seconds-delayed CSS animation on the body element, turning visibility from hidden to visible. This animation is turned off instantly (as far as I can say) by Javascript. However when you block Javascript entirely or block ampproject.org you have to endure the whole 8 seconds. I inject "body {animation: none !important}" into all pages to remedy this.
- cerved 5y agoIs it possible to see this in action on desktop?
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- roenxi 5y agoI don't like AMP, but I like this headline less. That is classic media trolling. They don't know what "publishers" actually feel about Google and there is no evidence than anything is "irreparably broken". It is actually remarkable how quickly businesses forgive and forget.
- DevKoala 5y agoDuring the last antitrust suite against Google it was confirmed that Google developed AMP to combat header bidding in order to protect their price arbitrage cut in their ad exchange. Publishers are now weaponizing against Google.
- riffraff 5y agoIsn't the antitrust suite still ongoing? I thought we're still talking of accusations, not proven facts (tho I believe them true).
- saurik 5y agoAFAIK those weren't claims, as the claims aren't that specific: they were revelations that came from discovery that will be used as evidence to attempt to defend the claims.
- acdha 5y agoYou’re right: those were claims that the state attorneys general are comfortable defending in court so presumably they have pretty good evidence but we’ll see how they hold up under defense.
- acoard 5y agoYou are right they are largely allegations. I just checked, and it's not like we have smoking gun emails in disocvery as far as I can tell, though happy to be mistaken. >249. The speed benefits Google marketed were also at least partly a result of Google’s throttling. Google throttles the load time of non-AMP ads by giving them artificial one-second delays in order to give Google AMP a “nice comparative boost.” Throttling non-AMP ads slows down header bidding, which Google then uses to denigrate header bidding for being too slow. “Header Bidding can often increase latency of web pages and create security flaws when executed incorrectly,” Google falsely claimed. Internally, Google employees grappled with “how to [publicly] justify [Google] making something slower.” [0] [0] https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.564903/gov.uscourts.nysd.564903.152.0_1.pdf https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.nysd.56...
- pmontra 5y agoIf they are really displeased with Google, and I'm sure they are, they should run a campaign to invite users of their sites to install a browser different than Chrome. If they manage to destroy Google's quasi monopoly on the browser they'll make Google less powerful overall.
- DevKoala 5y agoChrome’s stronghold on the web and their ability to delay the death of the cookie allows advertisers to continue doing micro targeting and thus paying more per impression. Publishers would be shooting themselves in the foot if they steer users away from Chrome.
- ctack 5y agoIf they’re paying more per impression how is that shooting themselves in the foot?
- hayksaakian 5y agoadvertisers pay more per impression when they can target better. Publishers show ads and get paid from advertisers. (simplified)
- iamacyborg 5y agoThe problem is, the really big publishers have a cachet to the point where ad targeting works against them. As an advertiser, why would I pay big money to target an ad to the affluent New Yorker reading audience when I can target those same people for pennies on the dollar on other websites?
- secondcoming 5y ago'Brand Safety'... advertisers are very keen on this. They don't want their ads being flung across the dregs of the internet. Take grindr as an example... this app was blacklisted by most advertisers not because of homophobia, but because they don't want their brand appearing next to potentially pornographic content. The same happened when covid first broke out. Brand conscious advertisers didn't want to be associated with any covid-related content, no matter what the context.
- cblconfederate 5y agoAbsolutely... for a week or so
- DeathArrow 5y ago>what he identified as Google’s “vision for the web’s future and examples of best-in-class web experiences.” I'm not sure Google should be the only one to decide the web's future. Since they quasi monopolized the browser, they act like they own the web.
- pabs3 5y agoOwning the browser that the majority use means they basically do own the web.
- skinkestek 5y agoI wonder how many Firefox downloads a week originates from HN these weeks. Also, recent research has svown me that people on Slashdot doesn't like Google Chrome either.
- thatguy0900 5y agoEvery Firefox thread is filled with how sucky Firefox is, too. Might be driving just as many people to stay on Chrome.
- DeathArrow 5y agoRecognizing that Firefox is sucky is the first step to make it unsucky.
- wisniewskit 5y agoYet if all you ever do is talk about how sucky it is, then you're effectively just part of the PR wings of Firefox's competition.
- CRConrad 5y agoThe saddest thing of all is: Up until relatively recently Firefox was a lot less sucky, but then Mozilla quite deliberately suckified it.
- Animats 5y agoIt was clear that Google had turned to the dark side when Eric Schmidt first spoke at the Search Engine Strategies conference in 2006. Until then, SEO was the enemy. Google and Yahoo had previously sponsored a conference in 2005 on squashing search engine spam. What's new is that Google has now managed to alienate ad-supported publishers, their paying customers, as well.
- CRConrad 5y ago> What's new is that Google has now managed to alienate ad-supported publishers, their paying customers, as well. Huh? No, "ad-supported" means these publishers are getting paid to display these ads, not paying for anything, so they aren't customers. They're getting paid, which means they're suppliers. (What they supply is the eyeballs, yours and mine and everybody else's, that consume the ads.) In business, "the customer" is the one who pays for a good or service they wish to acquire: Here, that's the advertisers.
- ricardobayes 5y agoSpeaking to engineers at Youtube, their sentiment was similar. They felt when they took off the posters of 'don't be evil', it was a turning point.
- BiteCode_dev 5y agoBecause they can. They have no competition. Like MS in the 90'. Don't worry, in 20 years, all their PR will say they are your best friend again. They will be the underdog for some unforseen reason, and will suddenly call for respecting your private life, encrypting everything and give power to the user. The way MS does it for open source today. It's the circle of life for corporations.
- fiftyacorn 5y agoYup like oil and car companies going "green(TM)"
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- redis_mlc 5y agoI just made as many homepage URIs as possible static - even faster at rendering and more cacheable than AMP, and no "update treadmill" to appease a single monopolist.
- ramesh31 5y ago>Announcements and discussions on hot topics impacting the greater web community at the event included Google’s Privacy Sandbox initiative, improvements to Core Web Vitals and performance tools, and new APIs for Progressive Web Apps (PWAs). Stop trying to make PWAs happen. It's not going to happen.
- chrischapman 5y agoIt's somewhat off topic but why do you say this? Is it the 'progressive' issue or the 'web app' issue. My view is that a browser is a really good way to deliver applications - in fact, I prefer them to any other form of application. I'm not too hung up on the whole 'progressive' thing these days but a NoJS application still has it's benefits.
- CRConrad 5y ago> Is it the 'progressive' issue or the 'web app' issue[?] For me: Both. > My view is that a browser is a really good way to deliver applications - in fact, I prefer them to any other form of application. Eeurgh.
- ramesh31 5y ago>It's somewhat off topic but why do you say this? Is it the 'progressive' issue or the 'web app' issue. It's the Google issue. They've been shoving these APIs down our throats trying to make it happen solely to build up the Chrome ecosystem. Firefox does not and will not ever support them, and they will never become an actual web standard, although Google has tried to present it as such.
- joshuamorton 5y agoFirefox does support them though (but only on mobile), which makes it seem like there isn't a principled argument against them
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- ashtonkem 5y agoHonestly at this point, if you trust google you’re a fool. It’s demonstrated itself to be unreliable, capricious, and absolutely willing to break the law if it thinks it can get away with it. Do business with them if you absolutely must, but under no circumstance should you actually trust them.
- fmajid 5y agoAs a middleman, it is in Google’s interest to commoditize its complements, namely the publishers. Given how the incentives are not just misaligned but actually completely opposed, it was always the height of folly for publishers to assist Google (or Facebook).
- SimeVidas 5y agoHeh, when I watched the Chrome Summit recap video earlier this week, when they talked about the Privacy Sandbox developments, I remember thinking to myself “This is all cool, but I don’t trust you”. xD
- is_true 5y agoYou might not trust Google, but you cannot stop doing business with them unfortunately. If you are a publisher you need Google's traffic, and if you don't play by their rules you run with disadvantage with your competitors.
- benrapscallion 5y agoSeconded. As such, I’ve switched to Safari, DuckDuckGo, and Fastmail. But how does one escape their ubiquitous presence all over the web (Google analytics, ads)??? They’re like a creepy neighbor who keeps following you around.
- Fordec 5y agoCould install a Pi hole to block them off your home network entirely. But yeah, I'm also phasing out my google usage. Personally getting off gmail and professionally migrating off firebase and already refuse to work with GCP in any capacity.
- andy_ppp 5y agoHaha, this is nonsense, they will continue to ride every initiative Google come up with as it’s almost certain to increase revenues or at least not decrease them compared to participating competition!
- vital_beach 5y agoI remember EULALing my privacy away because Chrome was fast and freaking awesome. Now I have to block AMP links. I was once naive, now I'm more willing to deal with firefox
- throaway46546 5y agoI swear google outright punishes you for using Firefox with any of their services. Major annoyance for me right now is paste is broken on their terminal emulator when connecting to a Compute Engine VM instance over SSH.
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- clusterfish 5y agoYep. Running into issues all the time in YouTube, Gmail, gdrive. Lasts for months at a time. In my case almost all related to blocking third party cookies and such, not Firefox per se. Just makes me use Google services less.
- d3nj4l 5y agoOh, they won't do it blatantly, but every thing will be broken in small, barely noticeable ways - just one feature here that uses a chrome-only non standard API, just one invisible div here that destroys performance on Firefox but not on Chrome - that add up to be annoying. I clearly remember when I had to use Google Sheets heavily for work, a bunch of small yet grating bugs pushed me over the edge into using Chrome just for it. These are widely documented issues, and every time they draw scrutiny someone at Google will say "oh no it's just a bug, we'll fix it asap", and then they'll break something else. Again, and again, and again. To the point where one of the most popular extensions FF mobile just changes your user agent to Chrome's to get a flat out better search experience. And it works, because now even large companies like Slack just don't care enough about Firefox to support major features on it.
- e3bc54b2 5y ago
- kinlan 5y agoAs someone mentioned directly in this blog post I can tell you where I came from with the event at least. Trust. Making sure developers know what we're working and why we think it's important and when we can show everyone the data to back up our rationale. I think we still have a long way to go, but it's something I've always strived for my team (devrel) to do. I felt that it was important to ask these questions on the AMA (there was a fair few in the sli.do in other areas around trust) that centered around all the different pieces of work we do but also knowing that we're not the AMP team we can only answer with our perspective - we try to do everything in the open and developers should rightly judge us on how well we do. I do encourage people to check out the blink process as a place to keep a check on what we are thinking about.
- michael1999 5y agoThere is no fancy Latin name for the error of giving known liars the benefit of the doubt, but there should be. Google has been caught with their hand in the cookie jar, and your protestations that you work in a different department provide negative reassurance.
- m0zg 5y agoPublishers should never have trusted Google in the first place, seeing how they're feeding from the same pie, and Google wants more of that pie. That's like trusting the Green River killer with a brothel. Even if nothing happens right away, eventually you'll regret it.
- nyxaiur 5y agoOur leadership went all in and even created a special AMP agency. After cutting the losses and the promotion of endless google shills we are left with nothing except defunct code and some junior and mid level devs that are basically useless for the rest of the operation.
- aembleton 5y agoThis author still trusts Google with her readers data as she uses Google Analytics and Google Tag manager.
- NelsonMinar 5y agoAs a former Googler responsible for some of its first developer products, this AMP story has been really disappointing. If the allegations are true, what an embarrassment. Imagine making your career out of promoting AMP to developers and lying to them. Imagine being the engineer who inserted the one second delay for non-AMP ads. (I left Google many years before AMP was ever a thing, so no inside knowledge.)
- SpicyLemonZest 5y agoThis seems like a false headline. The article doesn’t point to a single publisher who says they’ve lost trust in Google-led initiatives. They quote some software devs with anti-Google takes, but the only actual publisher they talked to doesn’t seem to have an issue.
- rdiddly 5y agoAs for "irreparably damaging trust," better late than never! It was pretty obvious from the beginning that AMP was going to be an anti-competitive piece of shit. (Though throttling non-AMP ads might be a bit more brazen than I personally expected.)
- quercusa 5y agoThis sounds like it was carefully crafted by a lawyer: “We received no funds from Google for the project,” a spokesperson for Automattic said when asked if the company was compensated as a partner in this effort. There are ways to be compensated without receiving funds.
- coolso 5y agoAs much as I despise Google and AMP, the one upside to AMP was it allowed you access to almost every online news article that was behind a payroll. You could just Google the title of a paywalled article, click on the AMP version, and view the whole thing.
- michelb 5y agoBut they will jump on whatever the next bandwagon is if it gives them a SEO/traffic/SERP advantage.