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We disabled Google AMP at Tribune Publishing
- mushprom 4y agoI thought that Google was retiring AMP anyways?
- tyingq 4y agoSort of. They removed the only real reason people used it... "AMP will no longer be necessary for stories to be featured in Top Stories on mobile; it will be open to any page" But they didn't announce anything about retiring it. It's still there if you want it for some other reason.
- annyyy 4y agoI turned it off on my news site and unfortunately the ratings plummeted. Do you have any advice?
- annyyy 4y agowww.dci.com.br
- s17n 4y agoTribune Publishing's websites are hot garbage and a perfect example of why we need AMP in the first place.
- jacquesm 4y agoNo, that's not why we need AMP. They should just fix the garbage.
- callahad 4y ago"Just fix the garbage" doesn't work; it's there because someone in favor of the garbage wanted it there, and the folks opposed to the garbage didn't have the authority or influence to stop it. ...and that's the one thing AMP did right: it empowered developers to push back against the garbage by giving them a big ol' "Google says no" sign to wave around. Which is all kinds of problematic in terms of existential threats to the Open Web, but it did clean up that specific type of garbage. How do we give anti-garbage folks that same power in a post-AMP world, without resorting to centralized authority?
- refulgentis 4y agoEveryone microfocused on Google and forgot AMP exists because Apple and Facebook created closed "AMPs" that were completely private. No one won here except some people with an axe to grind and actual web users. Hopefully web vitals can be a similar forcing function for dev teams with managers, leading to better quality for users.
- kadoban 4y agoGoogle fucked it because they wanted the control. They could have easily made the spec just "here's the subset of crap you can use, and here's the extra rules" and left it at that, but they just had to add all of the other nonsense to give themselves control. Without that it would have been fine. They could have still added in the part where they give pagerank bonuses to sites that comply, so there'd be an enforcement mechanism too.
- chiefalchemist 4y agoIf sites were "just fixing the garbage" Google wouldn't have had a reasonable reason for rolling out AMP. I presume to some extent AMP was intended to be like Google Fiber. That is a kick in the pants to get others to up their game. It didn't work out that way. The truth is too many sites are done with an all-about-the-brand mindest. And users are a distant second in the priority list. I'm not sure what the answer is. Sure, obviously, it's not AMP. But we still need something. Users - which is all of us - are being abused.
- jacquesm 4y agoThey didn't have a good reason. They could have achieved everything and more that they said they wanted to get out of AMP by simply penalizing slow sites. It was just another power grab, and publishers went with it because AMP sites were given priority in the SERPs. Anyway, this has been talked about in many threads over 100's of comments.
- chiefalchemist 4y ago> They could have achieved everything and more that they said they wanted to get out of AMP by simply penalizing slow sites. It's not that simple. If the slow sites have better content and/or Google's customers (i.e., the people searching) expect those sites then Google has to deliver, or at least try. Keep in mind, it's also possible those slow site were spending ad money. Like it or not, Google can't intentionally piss them off. I'm not saying AMP was an ideal solution. Only that it was smarter than nothing. Nothing wasn't an option.
- karamanolev 4y agoBe that as it may, we need to get rid of AMP altogether. It's a much bigger evil than a bad website here or there. After AMP is gone, we can worry about one (or N) bad websites instead of a corp controlling all of them.
- aliqot 4y agoYep, perfection it isn't, but this is a step in the right direction. Hopefully, the initiative that brought this forward also slowly rectifies the other issues with the site.
- khatkhati 4y agoI don't know what you're talking about, they are nice, clean and snappy with JavaScript turned off :)))))
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- gerdesj 4y agoWhatevs with respect to Tribune (whom I've never heard of). You may not like their message but AMP is the messenger here and it is Minerva's kid brother that flunked school and took up delivering class A drugs on their BMX. This article is about dumping AMP - discuss! I found the medium article extremely well written with loads of stats to back up assertions. It is also mercifully short. That is exactly what I want to see. For me AMP is an example of "insidious" - it looks shiny ("my precious") but it will suck the life out of you eventually. AMP, fundamentally puts your content distribution in the hands of a third party (G) that can change it at will and that breaks the promise of the web and ensures that you will have your testes tickled at first and then twisted off. AMP is not simply a CDN - it doesn't simply regurgitate your stuff faster. It changes it and does things to it and also gathers as much data as it wishes, from your customers. My Precious ... Oh look: I've managed to conflate some fictional seriously damaged goods from Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings with what Google will do to you. Silly me.
- karaterobot 4y agoDid AMP improve the experience of Tribune Publishing websites? If it's hot garbage with AMP, removing it shouldn't hurt. But it will give them the ability to improve their sites rather than being locked into Google's choices.
- nightpool 4y agoYes, AMP does (or at least did) generally improve the UX and the load time of most pages that integrated it. No giant blobs of third party ad scripts, no huge interstitials that took over the entire page... Whatever else you might say about AMP, it did a good job at handcuffing publishers into not ruining their site with garbage
- acdha 4y agoExcept that it made most of them slower for mobile users because it blocked page display until over a megabyte of JavaScript had finished executing, at which point media files were unblocked. My local newspaper loaded noticeably faster without it but more importantly it was reliable: I could click on a link and read it while I was on the subway, but AMP pages frequently just burned my data plan for a blank page. They also broke scrolling for years and since the desktop experience was poor you had to deal with a hokey non-standard sharing widget.
- standyro 4y agoWhen I worked for Tribune (before the LA Times got sold off) it was a hot mess of adtech garbage like Taboola that nobody had the guts to get rid of.
- earthboundkid 4y agoTronc 4 lyfe.
- tomcam 4y agoFunny, I was going to post something snarky b/c TFA was attractive and easy to read. Since the author works for Chicago Tribune I went to the site and... not at all bad, considering the commercial constraints legacy media is stuck with.
- s17n 4y agoI agree, considering the constraints, it's not bad. The problem is the constraints, and whatever you think about AMP, at least it was an attempt to tackle this problem head on.
- wilde 4y agoGood riddance. AMP pages loaded noticeably more slowly for me and were typically broken when they finally painted.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- vonwoodson 4y agoHear, hear!
- robbyking 4y agoAnd it disables the browser's find functionality. It's such a core piece of functionality, I'm really surprised it's been broken for this long.
- account42 4y agoBroken? If you manually have to scan across the page you will see more ads. Corporations don't deserve the benefit of the doubt.
- nightpool 4y agoThe whole point of the Core Web Vitals project was to provide a neutral measure of "quality" that could replace the search rankings boost that AMP got, so I'm not surprised. I just wish they did something about giant interstitials as well
- dspillett 4y ago… yet they still use medium, with its collection of problems. The article doesn't state how the graphs are produced. I hope they are stacked rather than plain lines, otherwise the comment that people transitioned to normal mobile access is wrong and those visits just vanished.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- joebob42 4y agoI think they must be stacked based on their description of amp as most of their traffic when it's the lowest line, but I agree the graph design is bewildering and does not read to me as stacked without thinking hard about what they are saying.
- dspillett 4y agoYeah, I assume they are stacked. But they could do with better design to make that obvious (it isn't at all without inferring from the text) or some clarification in the text (or just with the graph key).
- ProAm 4y agoThe irony of disabling AMP but posting about it on Medium.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- hiccuphippo 4y agoI really wanted AMP to be to HTML/CSS what asm.js was to Javascript, a subset with better performance. What other alternatives are there? The Gemini project seems too barebones and requires its own browser.
- dheera 4y agoI actually kind of liked AMP because it regularly circumvented paywalls and those fucking annoying newsletter popups.
- waynesonfire 4y agoMakes sense. That must have been the "loss of control over user experience" that publishers complained about.
- arcticbull 4y agoUnfortunately it hijacked scrolling, navigation and search which more than made up for the lack of annoying newsletter popups. I personally use the Amplosion plug-in for Safari on iOS which nukes AMP pages from orbit transparently, substituting their standard variant. [1] [1] https://amplosion.app https://amplosion.app
- busymom0 4y agoI use archive dot org and archive dot is for bypassing paywall. The dot org one works best usually in sites with JavaScript.
- AlexCoventry 4y agoI liked it because it dangled the possibility of author signatures on content, via RealURL.
- tomcam 4y ago> What other alternatives are there? 1. Fantastic content. If you have that pretty much nothing else matters. 2. Hand-tuned CSS and HTML
- sgammon 4y agoWeird that giving google all your traffic didn't end up boosting your own bottom line /s
- sgammon 4y agoSarcasm aside,I feel like AMP was the first time Google violated their promise to users, and to their own ecosystem. "Make the web fast" was Google's way of keeping up with native performance in iOS's walled garden, before Android came into its own. Obviously this same strategy is important for Workspace's competitiveness against Office, pre MS365. But with AMP, Google's promise mutated into something which had no exchange in value: Google said, "We'll serve your content, we'll make it fast. You don't even need to sustain the traffic, we'll do that for you. It's the ultimate fast." But then, Google turned around and cost-extracted that same market into semi-permanent chaos. This promise to users ("we both win when the web is fast") was borrowed and manipulated to Google's benefit and the publisher's detriment, and, in essence, became, "look at me; I am the [publisher] now. Here are your GA stats for the traffic we decided to send you today for your content." I'm not even sure as a user that I care about AMP. So what, articles were faster for awhile. You could have accomplished the same thing for almost no money with a desktop version of Google Reader, but here we are.
- Apotheos 4y agoI know we dumped AMP at The Daily Beast because revenue per page view went down significantly enough to negate any supposed benefits of using it. If I remember correctly pageviews didn't increase when we used it, which was the idea as google would rank us higher.
- tootie 4y agoMy news site dumped AMP late last year also. We were doing a replatform and just didn't carry it over. Didn't see any appreciable changes in traffic or user behavior.
- ec109685 4y agoProblem with turning off AMP, it’s generally replaced with a page with even more ads, so the user suffers in that aspect.
- paulcole 4y agoAds aren’t bad. They’re a way to get content without needing to exchange money for it. The user suffer more when the content goes away.
- jjulius 4y agoAds aren't, generally. Targeted advertising, however, is trash and needs to go away.
- tacker2000 4y agoI get your argument, but more ads mean more intrusive JS and longer load times, which make the user experience worse. But yes, of course one needs to weigh these two sides. Free content needs to be monetized. And AMP is a downside for everyone, i think we can agree on that. Seems like content creators didnt even get any of the promised benefits out of it.
- jonas21 4y ago
- yyyk 4y agoGoogle already controls the most important browser and the biggest search engine. AMP let them also run javascript on every AMP site, ability to de facto become for host for most AMP users and a justification for dictating what your site did + excuse for manipulating search results. The web would have begun to turn into a closed system like Facebook. Fortunately Google did not have the strength to complete their design.
- zagrebian 4y ago> Fortunately Google did not have the strength to complete their design. Google was telling from the start that AMP was only a temporary solution, and that the end-goal of AMP is to disappear.
- acdha 4y agoCorporate marketing says lots of things which they don’t mean. Google actually required you to use AMP to get the best results placement and they took many years to implement solution-neutral alternatives which would have been easier to do in the first place. It’s really hard to believe they seriously intended to spend all of that extra developer time and strong-arm publishers on a temporary measure.
- yyyk 4y agoGoogle always treated AMP as permanent, even going as far as to introduce AMP Emails*, and slowing down non-AMP javascript content. It was only because of legal exposure created by the slowdown that they were forced to deemphasize AMP. * Nothing says 'temporary' more than introducing a tech to a form of communication which is expected to remain readable basically forever.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- ec109685 4y agoThe mobile web version they replaced amp with is awful: https://www.baltimoresun.com/education/bs-md-student-voting-rights-20220824-20220825-idt74c57vvfmbj26cj4nflfuly-story.html https://www.baltimoresun.com/education/bs-md-student-voting-... https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/crime/bs-md-ci-cr-timothy-reynolds-family-to-sue-city-fatal-squeegee-worker-encounter-20220826-657yxyxcczbxdp62onjngpjyma-story.html https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/crime/bs-md-ci-cr-timothy-... Interstitial pay walls, auto playing video ads that are pinned to the top, useless read more button, horrible tabula ads. It’s a total mess.
- cratermoon 4y agoI had forgotten that AMP was still a think after installing the AMP to HTML extension for Chrome. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirect-amp-to-html/kifkmmpiicbcnkjaliilaoeaojlldonl?hl=en https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirect-amp-to-ht...
- BobMit 4y agoGreat decision, especially since AMP no longer plays a privileged role in search results.