AMP Conf 2018: what future of Google’s web project means for publishers
I was lucky enough to get a chance to go to the recent AMP conference in Amsterdam and find out about new developments and how these might impact publishers. It was my first time in Amsterdam, so it was great for me to be able to visit the many bars, restaurants and cafes and soak in the view of all the canals and very speedy cyclists! Here is a summary of my highlights from the conference.
There were a few talks about this and a lot of chatter during the breaks. This seemed to be one of the main talking points and very relevant to myself in the publishing industry.
The main points were that content consumption on mobile is changing, long articles are hard to read and readers spend just 1–2 mins on articles. Currently, publishing content in a form that matches users’ needs is not easy, hence why we have AMP stories.
AMP stories are mobile first and consist of tappable interactions, rich visuals and are highly performant. As a user, you are getting bite-sized visual content for mobile, and as a publisher you can focus on content creation and distribution rather than technology. You can open an example on your mobile (or desktop) here. Google will surface stories in their search results and the developer preview is now available.
This was a talk from Ksenia Coulter, of the Washington Post, discussing AMP integration with their Arc publishing system. She first discussed one of her clients, Infobae, who have 45 million unique visitors a month, of which 78% come from mobile devices and 20% of the traffic is to AMP pages.
Arc’s ANS API takes content from any CMS and turns it into content without markup, e.g. images. Each feature on the site has a type, of which one of the options is the AMP type. So this means that rather than having a separate template for AMP pages, it uses the same template with only AMP components being displayed on AMP pages.
She listed the challenges they had faced, such as keeping the CSS size down below 50K, which they did by automatically failing a build if it got to the 48.5K mark and 3rd party integrations that may or may not support AMP. They also use their CMS ‘Ellipsis’ with a custom Chrome Extension, to create the AMP stories.
This was another interesting talk, by Lisa Wang from Google. She started off with some great statistics, most notably that 79% of shoppers who have trouble with site performance won’t return.
Lisa then went on to show a comparison of a non-AMP page versus an AMP page for the B&H photos website. Startlingly, she was able to pick a product, buy and get to the confirmation page before the non-AMP page had even finished loading!
Next up came Ralf Ohlenbostel, of Zalando, to explain a bit more about a real-world example and why it’s important to pick the pages you want to “AMP” wisely. His advice was to start with editorial guides, which are mostly images, text, sliders etc. These examples already have fewer complications and it means that without having to make drastic changes, you can be sure from historical tracking how the page will behave.
There was also a couple of examples of AMP components, including the datepicker, that would be helpful for sectors such as the Travel industry.
Personalisation was another key point. This included using the amp-access feature to show users different content based on their login status; amp-pixel, which tracks product views; amp-list to show users the items that they have viewed; and amp-form for taking payments etc.
And finally… AMP for email. The idea here being that rather having stale static content, you can complete tasks directly within the email, such as submitting a form or questionnaire, a holiday itinerary where the flight details are kept updated, or maybe a list of products where the prices are current.
Implementing AMP for email involves having an AMP version of your email, which would then fall back to HTML for clients that do not support AMP. The Gmail Developer Preview is now open for signups!
David White is a Software Engineer at The Telegraph
