Based on a report in The Wall Street Journal, Google’s Gifted Cellular Pages (AMP) are meeting with mixed reviews from publishers.
The core issue for publishers is that AMP pages don’t don’t give publishers as much control over advertising and create the same number of revenue.
The article claims:
For some publishers [setting for AMP in search results] is a problem, since their AMP pages don’t now generate advertising sales at the exact same rate as their mobile sites that are full.
Multiple publishers said an AMP pageview currently generates around half as much revenue as a pageview on their full mobile sites.
That’s mainly because of constraints related to the types of the advertisement technology providers that are now integrated with the platform and advertisement units AMP pages will allow, those publishers say.
AMP advertising are standardized and don’t allow certain types of takeovers or interstitials, which empower more to charge or offer more customization.
Google challenge the notion that monetize wo be n’ted by AMP for publishers. Properly implemented, Google says, AMP pages can create earnings comparable to publishers’ existing websites that are mobile.
The Washington Post and cNN are mentioned as examples of publishers whose AMP pages generate revenue at about the same amounts as their mobile sites in the post.
The post also states that some publishers don’t need to go on the record because they fear retaliation from Google discussing AMP challenges. That conspiracy mindset isn’t helpful, however.
Google should hear directly from publishers about their concerns and issues. Many of these publishers also consider, apparently, that AMP adoption will be driven on them as a ranking factor.
While Google has said that AMP usage isn’t a ranking variable, page speed will become one shortly. Google has said that AMP pages are 4x faster and use one-tenth the data in comparison to non-AMP pages and that.
Typically, AMP pages load in less than one second. As a practical issue, Google likely can never turn AMP straight into a position variable because it would get spanked by antitrust authorities (at least in Europe) were it to achieve that.
As mentioned, a few publishers told the WSJ that they were generally happy with monetization and AMP functionality. They added that an increasing percent of their cellular page views are coming from AMP pages.
AMP is Google’s effort to make the mobile web a more user-friendly location and increase user readiness to visit cellular sites (vs. apps). That, subsequently, will benefit mobile search usage.
So while there’s a bigger “altruistic” goal of speeding and cleaning up the mobile web, there’s also a very self-interested facet to AMP that ties directly to mobile search sales.
