What Happened
Earlier today, Google unveiled its answer to Apple News and Facebook’s Instant Articles: the Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project. Unlike Facebook’s or Apple’s content initiatives, AMP is an open standard that is essentially a subset of HTML, meaning that publishers and content owners won’t need to strike a deal with Google to use it. Instead, content creators can use AMP’s tools that take advantage of smart caching of content—either on their own servers or on Google’s servers—to make various webpage elements load faster. Google announced a number of platform partners for AMP, including Twitter, Pinterest, Adobe, LinkedIn, and WordPress, while major publishers such as The Guardian, Washington Post, and Vox are already trying it out.
What Brands Need To Do
Google is understandably invested in speeding up the mobile web, given it gets the majority of its revenue from web ads. And as mobile browsing continues to outpace desktop, media owners really need to take notice and put mobile optimization first. More importantly, AMP doesn’t seem to support the tracking code embedded in many targeted ads, therefore rendering those ads static. So brands need to be aware of this trade-off between access speed and ad targeting and pay attention as AMP evolves.
Source: VentureBeat
