Google Helping Mobile Publishing? Some Publishers Are Not So Sure
SAN FRANCISCO — Last month, Federico Viticci, who runs
MacStories, a news site devoted to Apple and its products, made a change in how
the site publishes articles for mobile gadgets. MacStories, he declared, would
no longer support a Google-backed method for faster loading of mobile web
pages, called AMP.
Mr. Viticci
said MacStories’s pages already loaded quickly without Google’s help. He also
didn’t like the idea of Google’s obscuring his site’s links — with AMP, they
read google.com instead of macstories.net — in the interest of
expediency.
“Feels
good” to no longer use the Google standard, Mr. Viticci wrote
on Twitter.
Mr.
Viticci’s experience underscores the ambivalent relationship that some web
publishers have developed with what was supposed to be Google’s
great boon for mobile publishing. When Google introduced Accelerated Mobile
Pages, or AMP, in October 2015, it said the new format would help publishers
with one of their biggest headaches on smartphones: Browsing mobile websites
was so frustratingly slow that many smartphone users abandoned pages before
they opened.
AMP has
since delivered on its promise of faster mobile web pages. Even so, publishers
— of smaller sites, especially, or individual bloggers — are beginning to worry
about giving too much control to Google in exchange for zippier web pages.
What’s more, Google’s approach to AMP has rankled some critics already
suspicious of the company’s outsize influence on the internet.
Much
of the publishers’ unease is rooted in Google’s presentation of AMP stories,
which appear as if they are Google articles. That’s because Google, to speed up
AMP, stores copies of publisher’s pages and serves them from its own internet
network. So when a reader clicks an AMP link, the address bar at the top of the
page displays google.com instead of the actual web address from the publisher.
“It looks like a Google story,” said
Danny Sullivan, founding editor of Search Engine Land, a web search news site.
“That’s part of the reason why you’re getting the nervousness from some of
these publishers.”
Google said that it had designed AMP to prioritize speed
and that it wanted to help — not harm — publishers, who get full accounting of
traffic, data and advertising revenue. Publishers also retain control of their
content and design. Google said serving up articles from its own internet
network was the best way it knew to achieve the AMP speeds, which are as much
as four times faster than a regular mobile web page.
“We always
try to present the content that is the best experience,” said David Besbris,
Google’s vice president of engineering.
Google
started AMP in 2015 because it worried that competitors like Facebook were
drawing web surfers inside their networks with faster-loading articles and keeping
them there. For Google, those rival sites were siphoning people away from the
open internet, where the search company — which created the internet’s most
valuable property by organizing the expanse of the World Wide Web — typically
operates.
Now articles
that use AMP appear prominently in Google search results on mobile devices. A
Google search for “Donald Trump” on a smartphone brings back a horizontal
carousel of articles from media organizations like Slate and The Wall Street
Journal at the top of the page. If someone clicks the first story in the
carousel, he or she is moved into a browser and can swipe instantly from one
story to another without leaving Google’s network.
Another
benefit of AMP for Google is that it keeps activity on the web, and away from
apps. More browsing on the internet means more web searches, and, in most
cases, that means more Google. This is even more pronounced on mobile devices,
where Google accounts for about 95 percent of all global web searches,
according to StatCounter.
Since
AMP’s launch, the open-source project has won over many big publishers who
praise Google’s responsiveness. They say readers are engaging more with ads on
AMP because they actually get to the stories and it’s a better experience.
There are more than 600 million pages running AMP on over 700,000 different
domains, including
publishers such as The New York Times and non-media sites like eBay.
David Gehring, a former Google employee and the chief
executive of Relay Media, a company that works with publishers to convert pages
to AMP, said the format had been positive for publishers grappling with
shrinking revenue in the shift from print to online advertising. He estimated
that up to 10 percent of mobile web content was already on AMP.
Yet
Mr. Gehring also said Google suffered from “tone deafness” when it came to
explaining the benefits of AMP, such as the ability for publishers to syndicate
articles across the mobile web without losing advertising or traffic.
That tone
deafness has rubbed some publishers the wrong way. In October, the software
developer Alex Kras created a stir when he wrote a post titled “Google May Be
Stealing Your Mobile Traffic,” in which he recounted what had happened when he
used AMP on his technology blog. After
he enabled AMP on his WordPress publishing software, Mr. Kras said, his old
posts displayed google.com and there was no
easy way to redirect readers to his own site.
“It made
me feel like my site wasn’t my own,” Mr. Kras said.
He later
said the title of his blog post was inaccurate, but stood by his concerns that
AMP could cost publishers mobile traffic, an assertion Google denies. Mr. Kras
said smaller publishers had more to lose if they used AMP, since big publishers
have more name recognition and readers are more likely to remember them as the
source of a story.
“Little
guys like myself don’t have this luxury,” he wrote in another blog post
after meeting with Google officials.
Still, Mr.
Kras decided to keep AMP because it was fast. "For that, a lot of little
things can be (temporarily) forgotten,” he said.
Google may be starting to acknowledge some publishers’
concerns. Last month, Google told
Search
Engine Land that it planned to make changes to AMP in 2017 to make it
easier for publishers to offer their own links and for readers to be redirected
to their sites. Google did not elaborate on its plans.
Several
bigger publishers say they are pleased with AMP and do not see anything
worrisome with Google.
“Google
has been a good partner,” said Mark Silverstein, the head of business
development at The Huffington Post, which is planning to push almost all of its
news content into AMP. “When they make decisions, they do a good job of
explaining why they reached that decision.”
Emily
Smith, head of content operations at Condé Nast’s Wired magazine, said
supporting AMP had pushed its mobile articles to the top of search results. For
web surfers conditioned to believe that the most relevant information is
presented first in search results, it’s important for a media organization to
be near the top.
“It’s like
being above the fold in a newspaper,” she said.
About 15
percent of The Washington Post’s traffic comes from AMP pages. The Post is now
using the lessons from AMP to move its articles to a separate, faster-running
mobile platform that runs like an app but does so over the web.
Joey
Marburger, director of products for The Post, said that its readers were
scrolling further on AMP stories, but that it was building its own fast system
to gain greater control over ads and features.
“We
have to be where our readers are coming from,” Mr. Marburger said. “But it’s
also important to have more control over our own content.”
Regards
Pralhad
Jadhav
Senior
Manager @ Library
Khaitan & Co
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