On 7 October, Google announces that it will be running the Accelerated Mobile Pages project (AMP) in collaboration with nearly 30 publishers.
This project is in response to the continuous problems publishers and readers around the world experience when browsing on their phone, where webpages with rich content takes a long time to load and everytime this happens, it lose reader or potential subscriber.
Advertisers also lose opportunity for revenue when this happens. Consumers will hardly pay attention to the ads when they are venting at the pages that takes forever to come up.
The new open source initiative promises to dramatically enhance performance on mobile web browser even with bountiful content like video, animations and graphics. The same goes with smart ads. Google wants to decrease the waiting time for mobile web regardless what kind of device you are using.
The AMP HTML will allow websites to build light-weight webpages. Check out a demo on Google Search below, courtesy of Google.
Google also plans on improving other Google products like Google News by integrating the AMP HTML pages.
Among the publishers onboard are Twitter, Pinterest, WordPress.com, Adobe Analytics and LinkedIn.
This endeavour may help shape the discussions surrounding the ethics of ad blocking especially after Apple approves ad blocker apps to be sold on its Apple Store.
Many are pointing out that ad blockers penalises journalists and publishers by taking away one of the only way of funding their work. Advertisers are likewise agrieved especially if their ads are among the “good ones” i.e. the ones that doesn’t slow down your browser or laden with virus.
Google seems to be aiming at countering the motivation behind ad blocking by eliminating one of the reasons users hate ads on websites. The AMP project will help define the parameters of ad experience that still provide the speed it strives for.
The AMP may still not solve the problems of virus-filled and unsolicited ads, but at least, there is one less reason to install an ad blocker on your browser.
