What Is AMP Project? Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project

For many, reading on the mobile web is a slow, clunky and frustrating experience - but it doesn’t have to be that way. The Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project is an open source initiative that embodies the vision that publishers can create mobile optimized content once and have it load instantly everywhere.

If you are new to AMP HTML, our technical introduction is a great place to get started and provides an overview of the project and how AMP HTML works.

A lot can happen in a year when people unite around a common cause. In the case of the open source Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, that means improving the mobile web for everyone. That’s a tall order in a world dominated by nearly 7 billion small screens, but as we celebrate the first anniversary of AMP we are making headway.

From day one, a key focus for AMP has been speed. It is arguably one of the most frustrating things about the mobile web — borne out by recent Google research that shows that 53% of people will leave a site that fails to load in three seconds or less. That’s the worst of all worlds for users, businesses, publishers, websites and the mobile web as a whole.

To date the AMP project has been a story about momentum. This is clear in everything from the pace of releases of the open source code to the number of participants embracing the AMP format:

WordPress — AMP’d up tens of millions of websites in addition to VIP publishers
Reddit — Announced tens of millions of pages in AMP
Bing — iOS and Android app supports AMP
Ebay — AMP’d up 15 million product category pages
Pinterest — Leveraging AMP for Pins
Google — Launched AMP in Search web results

So just how is that speed translating for publishers and websites that have AMP’d up their content? Well, among news publishers, the first to get on board with AMP, there are a number of case studies that highlight some real benefits when content loads fast:

Washington Post — 23% increase in mobile search users who return within 7 days
Slate — 44% increase in monthly unique visitors and a 73% increase in visits per monthly unique visitor
Gizmodo — 80% of Gizmodo’s traffic from AMP pages is new traffic, 50% increase in impressions
Wired — 25% increase in click through rates from search results, with CTR on ads in AMP stories up by 63%.
Relay Media — in the last 30 days alone has converted over 2.5 million AMP pages for publishers like The Daily Dot, Hearst Television and The Miami Herald which says mobile users who start with an AMP article spend 10% more time than those who land on regular mobile pages.

There is little doubt that faster is better when it comes to content. Not surprisingly, the same is true for ads. A DoubleClick study earlier this year comparing ad performance on AMP and non-AMP mobile pages across 150 publishers found that:

80%+ of the publishers realized higher viewability rates
90%+ of the publishers drove greater engagement with higher CTRs
The majority of the publishers saw higher eCPMs (Impact and proportion of lift varies by region and how optimized the non-AMP sites are)

And in this case study, one of Europe’s biggest native advertising platforms, plista, conducted its own experiment among premium publishers like n-tv.de, faz.net, abendzeitung.de, and golem.de to measure AMP’s impact on web app widget speed and profitability.

For one publisher, CTRs were 600% greater after the implementation of AMP
The average increase for publishers in the test was 220%

This open source initiative is thriving because there is a strong community behind it getting involved in everything from working groups to contributing to the Github page with suggestions, feedback and code spec.

While the first year of the AMP Project has gotten off to a good start, there still remains a lot of work ahead. The AMP roadmap is a good way to stay up to date on what is happening next. We look forward to returning in a year’s time with even more awesome progress as we work together to make the mobile web great for everyone.

BRINGING YOU UP TO SPEED ON AMP

Speed and user experience. This is the mantra of the AMP Project as we seek to make the web fast and compelling. Speed is also the byword in the project’s growth and progress. In the six weeks since the October 7 announcement, there has been a whirlwind of activity from publishers, technology providers and developers.

Thousands of publishers have expressed interest in AMP since the preview launched with the likes of the BBC, Sankei, New York Times, News Corp, Washington Post and more. Since then, many others have committed their support to the project, including R7.com and NZN Group in Brazil; CBS Interactive, AOL, Thrillist, Slate, International Business Times/Newsweek, Al Jazeera America and The Next Web in the US; El Universal and Milenio in Mexico; The Globe and Mail and Postmedia in Canada, as well as many more across the globe. The Local Media Consortium (LMC), a partnership of 70+ media companies collectively representing 1,600 local newspapers and television stations, has also voiced their support.

As an open-source initiative, the AMP Project is open to ad partners across the industry who adopt the spec, and we’re seeing incredible momentum from the ecosystem. Today we’re announcing that Outbrain, AOL, OpenX,, DoubleClick, and AdSense are working within the framework to improve the advertising experience for users, publishers and advertisers on the mobile web. More to come as we continue to ramp this aspect of the effort.

Ensuring that traffic to AMP articles is counted just like current web articles is also a major focus of the project. comScore, Adobe Analytics, Parse.ly and Chartbeat have all stated that they intend to provide analytics for AMP pages within their tools. They have since been joined by many others: Nielsen, ClickTale and Google Analytics. This development is significant for the AMP Project because publishers developing for AMP will not skip a beat in terms of analytics and measurement — analytics for AMP are real time and will work within your existing provider.

And as for the developer community forming around AMP, more than 4500 developers are following the AMP Project’s ongoing engineering discussions on GitHub. Since the announcement, over 250 pull requests — contributions of new code, samples, and documentation — have been made; and discussions around major new features such as analytics and templates have taken place.

Google will begin sending traffic to your AMP pages in Google Search early next year, and we plan to share more concrete specifics on timing very soon. In the meantime, the AMP Project invites everyone to take part in the conversation on GitHub, and encourages you to begin experimenting with building AMP pages as soon as possible.

Posted by David Besbris (Vice President of Engineering, Google Search) and Richard Gingras (Head of News, Google)