The 5 W’s of Google AMP

What

The Accelerated Mobile Pages (“AMP”) Project is an open source initiative that came out of discussions between publishers and technology companies about the need to improve the entire mobile content ecosystem for everyone — publishers, consumer platforms, creators, and users.

Today, the expectation is that content should load super fast and be easy to explore. The reality is that content can take several seconds to load, or, because the user abandons the slow page, never fully loads at all. Accelerated Mobile Pages are web pages designed to load instantaneously — they are a step towards a better mobile web for all.

Why

Speed matters and instant is the ideal. Research shows that the bounce rate can be as high as 58% for web pages that take nearly ten seconds to load. Using the AMP format will make it far more compelling for people to consume and engage with more content. But this isn’t just about speed and performance. We also want to promote enhanced distribution so that publishers can take advantage of the open web’s potential for their content to appear everywhere quickly — across all platforms and apps — which can lead to more revenue via ads and subscriptions.

Where

Accelerated Mobile Pages are just like any other HTML page, but with a limited set of allowed technical functionality that is defined and governed by the open source AMP spec. Just like all web pages, Accelerated Mobile Pages will load in any modern browser or app webview. AMP files take advantage of various technical and architectural approaches that prioritize speed to provide a faster experience for users. The goal is not to homogenize how content looks and feels, but instead to build a more common technical core between pages that speeds up load times.

Who

The project is open to all players in the ecosystem – publishers, consumer platforms, and creators. In this early stage of the project, a group of publishers and platforms have come together to demonstrate how Accelerated Mobile Pages can transform the mobile web experience. They include platforms like Twitter and Google, tech players like ChartBeat and WordPress.com and publishers like Vox, The New York Times, The Guardian and Globo.

When

On October 7th, 2015, the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project announced the release of the initial technical specification which will appear on GitHub, a broadly used repository for open-source content. We are also providing an early developer demo of what a faster mobile web can look and feel like with Accelerated Mobile Pages. More features and functionality will be added over the coming weeks, including functional support for subscription models as well as vendor support for advertising functionality. As more of this functionality becomes commonly available, we hope to see more and more major consumer platforms integrating AMP pages into their apps and services.

How

Since “AMP HTML” is built entirely out of existing web technologies, the development process mirrors the one publishers are already using today. Publishers can familiarize themselves with the AMP HTML specification on GitHub. For those used to the current process, we don’t expect a significant learning curve.