AMP

AMP grows its footprint

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The AMP family is set to grow its international footprint with news today that the biggest search engines in Asia Pacific will start to distribute AMP pages to a new audience of more than 1 billion people.  

Baidu and Sogou, which account for around 90% of the search market in China, made the announcement on the opening day of the first AMP developer conference which is taking place in New York. They were joined by Yahoo Japan which said it will connect to AMP pages from their Search results, bringing all the goodness of AMP to their 58m daily users in Japan.

The addition of these key distribution platforms represents a major step for the open source project which launched in October 2015 alongside a handful of publishers and technology companies all united by a common cause:  make the mobile web work better for everyone.

Baidu, Sogou and Yahoo Japan join a growing roster of companies already supporting AMP from Bing to Pinterest and from Google to LinkedIn, which said it sees a 10% increase in time spent in an AMP article vs non-AMP, the most critical metric for their news feed.  The expansion underlines the value of AMP for publishers and websites who don’t have to customize anything for each of these platforms –  develop AMP pages once and they just work on all supported platforms.

Of course it’s never been easier to build AMP pages with all the major CMS systems actively supporting AMP.  Over the next two days we will hear from some technology integrators — companies like Relay Media and Postlight — which help build solutions from scratch and even convert existing web archives in a matter of days or weeks.

This whole ecosystem makes developing and publishing AMP pages easy and accessible to smaller publishers and websites that may not have the necessary in-house technology resources readily available.  Take Tumblr, which has already turned on AMP on for a number of sites but is planning to ramp things up for all their 300m+ blogs over the coming weeks.  

While we continue to see many news publishers building new AMP pages, we also see increased adoption from e-commerce, travel, recipes and other diverse websites around the world, with new ones joining every day.  eBay was one of the first eCommerce companies to launch AMP in production and will tell developers at the conference why they bet on AMP as well as share some tips and tricks and new metrics along the way.  Likewise, one of India’s biggest retailers SnapDeal has gone all-in on AMP, and is seeing a 52% improvement in average daily orders

AMP also offers a number of monetization options for publishers and websites, from native advertising, to analytics tracking and even the latest launch from Cloudflare of an AMP ad verification and optimization service.

Additionally we are applying the AMP framework to ads to make them faster, lighter and more secure.  With AMP Ads, native ad exchange Triplelift – one of the newest members of the AMP family — delivered ads that are 3x lighter and load 6x faster than their traditional counterparts. The ads also saw a strong uplift in viewability and corresponding improvements of 13%  in CTRs and eCPMs. You can see more case studies here.

At the heart of this first AMP conference is community.  We had almost 10,000 engaged developers on Github, hundreds of people reporting bugs and 300 code contributors from many companies.  Everyone has played a part in making AMP better, underlining that it is by working together that we can succeed in making the mobile web live up to its full potential.

We hope this event is the first of many.  But don’t worry if you can’t make it in person because you can follow along on a live stream here

Posted by David Besbris, VP Google Search, AMP Project Lead at Google