Google’s Potential Game Changing Boost To Mobile Pages

It didn’t take long for Google to fire back at Facebook’s Instant Articles. While the two company strategies differ, they both impact the future of news content distribution on mobile platforms.

Five months: that’s all it took for Google to respond to Facebook’s mobile offensive. In Mountain View, where the response has been brewing, the product is called AMP — Accelerated Mobile Pages. Not a super sexy name, but it could have been worse: the project was initially called PCU for Portable Content Unit. At least, AMP is self-explanatory.

AMP comprises two main feature:

1. Speed. When it comes to latency, web users are notoriously unforgiving. On a smartphone, a single page can take many seconds to load. Multiple case studies show that people just walk away from a service that is too slow. By contrast, AMP mobile pages load in a blink. Judge for yourself by turning off wifi on your phone and going to g.co/ampdemo. You’ll land on a Google main search page apparently identical to the traditional one. Pick a subject and hit Search. Depending on your location and other variables only known to Google — remember, it’s a demo, you get a carousel, linked to a series of AMP-coded pages. It will look like this:

(Click here to play the video)

Another way to look at AMP is to compare these two pages from The Guardian (one of the most advanced media within the AMP Project.) In the graphic below, the URL on the left is the standard mobile page, the right is the AMP version (simply add “/amp” at the end of any Guardian URL to get the accelerated version):

Depending on network conditions and the speed of your smartphone’s processor, the loading time is reduced by up to 80%-90%. I’ve been testing amp-pages for a couple of months now, it works spectacularly well.

How did Google achieve such loading speed improvements? Again, in plain English: “amp-html” strips off most of the conventional web page payload and only keeps the HTML code directly involved in content rendering: text, images, videos gifs, basic ad formats and a few strictly mandatory trackers. Everything else — javascripts, iframes, embeds, large chunks of the CSS etc. — known to slow down page downloads is shuttled to a separate “container”. As for ads, they load separately, usually one second after the editorial content. No more waiting for a promotional video to start playing.

To speed up access, the other trick is a massive caching process that looks like this:

One important thing: the caching process can be performed by Google, or by the publisher itself. Needless to say, AMP works better when Google does the caching. The idea being to be as close as possible to the end-user, Google controls a massive infrastructure extending down to storage bays hosted by most ISPs or cell phone carriers. As a result, a single page can be replicated and cached hundreds of times. In response to those who see AMP as the Trojan horse allowing Google to “own” the publishers’ pages, capturing all the data, hijacking their value, etc., Google caching is merely an option. Practically, after careful analysis, all publishers I talked to intend to hand the caching operation off to Google — it’s free…

2. AMP supports monetization objects. Whether it is an ad format, or a subscription process, editorial content viewed from a social network or via a third party referrer will keep its economic attributes: Google does not take a cut on the ads sold by the publisher. In practice, this entails the daunting task of connecting to the AMP ecosystem all the apparatus that comes with content publishing: ad servers, analytics such as Chartbeat (who is AMP’s founding analytic partner), ad networks, and also audience-profiling.

Google doesn’t like the parallel with Facebook Instant Articles. If both are aimed at solving the mobile user experience, there is a big difference: Instant Articles are part of Facebook’s walled garden while Google’s AMP is an open project: its specifications and code are publicly available on Github, the de rigueur open-code repository; site owners willing to develop AMP-compatible pages have all the tools at their disposal. This is meant to encourage broad AMP adoption. Today, the initial core group includes about 40 publishing partners (including 8 European ones):

It is likely to expand quickly: Wordpress will join the AMP project. Automattic Inc. the privately-held company behind the Wordpress blogging platform, is working on a dedicated AMP plug-in. This is an impactful move: Wordpress powers 24% — or 60 million — of the world’s websites (including our Monday Note.) It is expected that many more CMS (Content Management Systems), off-the-shelf or proprietary, will develop their own integration tools to generate AMP contents.

Making the AMP Project open is the combined result of ideology and pragmatism. On the ideology side, Google’s management firmly believes that an open web is in everyone’s best interest; it creates standards that are widely adopted and improved by the community. A related — and perhaps contradictory — motive is Google’s CEO Sundar Pichai and his engineering team resent the unbearable level of bloat that plagues the web.

As for the pragmatic side, last Spring, Google was taken aback by Facebook’s Instant Articles announcement. The staff in charge of media partnerships was especially concerned about big names jumping on the Facebook bandwagon. Something needed to be done quickly to avoid letting the highly focused rival from Menlo Park take the media industry over, especially the often desperate legacy companies.

Google had two levers. The first one was the Digital News Initiative, an alliance formed with a first group of eight European publishers and built on three pillars: a European fund to support innovation, a Training and Research Program and a Product Development group that quickly started to work on AMP. The second asset is Google’s immense engineering firepower. In fact, Google had for long coveted the idea of retooling the HTML language to address the ever growing mobile user population. A team of top engineers had been working for a while on a simple brief: “Two seconds to download a page on 3G-connected smartphones”, as a senior engineer told me less than a year ago.

Last week’s pre-launch of the AMP Project is a first and decisive step. But there still are many hurdles to overcome. On the partnership side, it shouldn’t be too difficult to co-opt more publishers and e-commerce players, they’re all dealing with growing mobile audiences. On the technical side, though, an immense amount of work remains to be done to integrate the disparate technologies that power today’s web. Below is just a sample of the many players Google will have to approach at some point:

Another issue is the need to integrate many complicated audience monetization systems. Paywalls, for instance. Among the DNI publishing partners, the FT.com, NRC (Netherlands) and Les Echos are pushing hard for a quick integration of a metered system that must be activated by every AMP page. Problem is: there are many paywalls flavors. All publishers (and eventually e-commerce sites) will also ask that their audience profiling system work seamlessly with AMP — which goes against the notion of cached pages: cached content can’t “know” in advance what audience it’ll play for.

On the advertising side, AMP is also faces the adblockers challenge. As of today, the system does not prevent any removal of promotions by adblockers’ software. But AMP is reformatting ads in a non-intrusive way — a static presence that does not ruin navigation. As such, it could be a major first step towards an “acceptable ads” policy that sounds like the only way out of the problem.

At some point, Google will also have to talk to walled gardens defenders, namely Facebook and Apple. In theory, the two might have some interest in embracing an open standard to serve faster pages within their environments. At least, it could benefit their users. It will be interesting to see when and how the quest for a better user experience will collide with the commercial interests of these three giants.

— frederic.filloux@mondaynote.com

Disclosure: In the Digital News Initiative launched by Google earlier this year, I represent the Groupe Les Echos, France’s main business news publisher. As such I was involved in discussions around AMP from the start, along with my colleagues from The Guardian, the FT.com, La Stampa, NRC, El Pais, Die Zeit and FAZ. Together we had numerous discussions — either with or without Google present — in London, MountainView, Paris and at the Newsgeist conferences in Phoenix, and Helsinki. Worth mentioning: expenses incurred by all working group members of DNI’s founding partners are paid by the respective publishers.
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 (The second article on Blendle will be published next week)