Google makes mobile web faster and cheaper with AMP

Loading web pages is going to get much quicker with the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project (AMP) from Google being activated by late February. In a blog post on December 9, Richard Gingras, Head of News at Google said that their app partners that include Twitter and Pinterest will notice web pages linked to a url or picture load four times faster (and use eight times less data) than it does now. Several websites including BuzzFeed, BBC, The Economist, Financial Times, Mashable, The Huffington Post, Time, The Telegraph, The Washington Post and Vox Media have already started publishing their articles using AMP HTML.

The mobile experience of the web has seen some leaps in terms of layout and interactiveness but it has always been tormented by the lack of reliable and fast internet connections. With AMP, Google is helping content publisher deliver the content to their readers faster along with a uniform experience. As the video represents, jumping from thumbnails or hyperlinks (links in messages, news readers, searches or apps) to articles and webpages is much faster with AMP. Gingras also said that the feature might be integrated in more apps including LINE, Viber and Tango. As for content, more publishers such as Network18, NDTV, and DNA India in India intent to start publishing with AMP too.

AMP is also working on handling analytics, advertising and subscriptions better. While ads are being tweaked to be faster and resizable, analytics tools like comScore, Chartbeat, Google Analytics, and Parse.ly will add AMP support by the time traffic starts hitting these pages next year. Paywalls and subscriptions (for premium content) are being built to make the experience smoother. But things still seem to be in early stages with the blog post giving little insight into how it will be implemented.

Pinterest with AMP (Pinterest )

Pinterest with AMP (Pinterest )

Pinterest without AMP (Pinterest )

Pinterest without AMP (Pinterest )

As you can see, using AMP, Pinterest has already made loading web pages on mobile (Android and iOS) faster without losing out on appearance unlike the current feature in Chrome that loads stripped down versions of web pages when the internet connection speeds are down.