Online publishers are weighing up whether to ditch Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology which last year became unnecessary for ranking in the most-competitive spots on Google search results.
Press Gazette understands the format now has most value for free-to-read publishers like The Sun and Mail Online, which still benefit from AMPâs high-performing ad revenue and fast page speeds making for a good user experience.
Subscription-focused publishers on the other hand may prefer to ditch AMP as it offers a worse experience for paying readers who can find themselves being asked repeatedly to log in and missing out on personalisation. Questions also remain as to whether performance in AMP is recorded before or after a publisherâs subscription interface.
As of last summer, publishers are no longer required to use the AMP format for their stories in order to appear in the much-coveted Top Stories carousel that appears at the top of Google results pages for news-related searches. Any pages are now eligible as long as they meet Google Newsâs content policies.
Around a third of URLs seen in Top Stories in UK and US search pages are now estimated to be non-AMP.
In addition, although it has a much smaller influence on the news publishing industry than the dominant search giant, Twitter discontinued support for AMP at the end of last year.
Publishers are now split between those in a âwait and seeâ mindset yet to decide if ditching AMP could be worthwhile â still the majority â and those who have already made up their minds to move on without it.
AMP had been necessary to rank in Top Stories on mobile for five years and publishers poured time and money into making sure they appeared there. Those top slots account for the âvast majorityâ of publishersâ organic search traffic outside of Google News, according to Luke Budka, director of digital PR at Definition.
Budka said of the reaction to Googleâs announcement: âI imagine publishersâ jaws collectively dropped⊠all that time and money publishers invested into AMP version[s] of every news page has now effectively gone to waste.â
The major advantage of AMP is that it is âlightweight and fastâ. âGoogle likes returning these types of pages to users because it encourages them to keep coming back to the search engine,â Budka said.
Instead, whether they are moving away from AMP or not, publishers are pouring money into what Google calls Core Web Vitals (CWVs), which look at the user experience of a webpage using metrics such as how fast it loads and becomes usable.
To many publishers AMP was not a waste of time and money because it set them up well for this page experience update and has meant a good starting point from which their own developers could start.
A Google spokesperson said: âWhen people come to Google, we want it to be easy to find relevant, high-quality information and websites that have a good user experience. Page experience is one of many ranking factors in search, and for many site owners, AMP continues to be an efficient and effective way to achieve a great page experience.â
Budka said: âTo be fair, this time around, Google has repeatedly pointed out that even if your CWVs are poor, youâll still rank well if you produce great content (suspect this is a shout to publishers).â
Association of Online Publishers managing director Richard Reeves said: âThe implementation of CWVs in 2021 naturally raised questions from publishers around the long-term need for AMP. At the time, most publishers decided to address the criteria for CWVs, but also continue with AMP.
âNow, we are starting to see some publishers running tests to gain more insight into the value that AMP provides alongside CWVs, so they can make an informed decision moving forwards. But whether they still need AMP will depend on several factors. For instance, a news outlet may see more value from AMP for breaking news stories, versus a lifestyle-focused publication.â
Reeves said the issue remained âfront and centreâ in AOPâs audience development steering group meetings âespecially as there are still areas of confusion around the roll out of CWVsâ.
âFor example, as more publishers look to subscription models, is performance recorded prior to or after the subscription interface? Google remains engaged with publishers around these sorts of queries and questions â the type of teething issues you would expect to occur with any new system.â
The Sun: AMP helped âraise the standardsâ
At The Sun, AMP has helped âraise the standards of where we know we need our pages to be if we want to continue to win visibility and drive traffic through Top Stories,â according to head of SEO Carly Steven.
Steven told Press Gazette: âWeâve had really positive experiences with AMP, itâs obviously a great user experience and from our point of view of course, like all publishers, anything that is good for our readers and makes the process of reading our content easier for them is a win for us.â
It had previously been like being in an âelite clubâ of publishers who could appear in Top Stories, which was the âbig opportunityâ for search traffic, she added.
The publisher is now considering whether it will turn AMP off âone dayâ and doing a lot of work on its CWVs to make its pages âas fast and as user friendly with the best possible experience that we canâ, Steven said. The only real downside of AMP she mentioned was that it means extra work for developers.
[Read more: Publishers agree best practice on linking to original sources as fair citation âvital to survivalâ]
Steven said the jump to a third of Top Stories articles being non-AMP was bigâ but that âat the moment most content⊠is still AMP so I think like everybody weâre maybe sitting on the fence a little bit until a few more people make that leap â but I think the ones that have have seen really positive results, so thatâs really encouragingâ.
In addition AMP still monetises well for advertising-reliant publishers. Steven said the pages remained âhigh performingâ for revenue.
âWeâre not in a rush to go we donât need to be on this anymore, letâs jump off,â she said. âWe obviously want to make sure that before we come anywhere near that decision that obviously technically our pages are performing better than our AMP pages and that it makes sense from a revenue perspective as well.â
Steven said The Sun is at a âwait and seeâ stage to watch how others do without AMP before making its own decision, but that as far as she knows none of the publishers The Sun considers its main competitors have ditched the format yet. âIt still feels like very, very early days,â she said.
Irish Independentâs AMP experiment
At the Irish Independent and its sister titles the Belfast Telegraph and Sunday World, however, AMP was turned off last year â even before the CWVs changes came into effect.
The newspaperâs owner Independent News and Media was bought by Belgian-based media group Mediahuis in 2019 â and none of the existing titles in the group used AMP. Googleâs products are not the same in every country and titles like De Standaard were able to perform well on Google News in Belgium without AMP so the company, which wanted to run one technology stack across all its titles, asked the Independent to experiment to see how ditching it would impact traffic.
âWe tested that because we would rely on Google for 50% of our users and we werenât going to just switch it off just because our Belgian motherlord didnât really have AMP in their country,â head of SEO Dan Smullen told Press Gazette.
These conversations were going on for about a year to 18 months before Google said AMP was no longer a Top Stories requirement, the announcement of which Smullen said gave him âa lot more confidenceâ about doing the test.
It is hard to do A/B tests on news sites because traffic can be so spiky depending on the news agenda, so the style and life sections were tested because of their relatively consistent and evergreen output.
The results, according to Smullen, found âabsolutely no impact in terms of trafficâ â although he noted that the test could not be perfect without testing news as it is news that generally appears in the Top Stories carousel.
When the Independent turned AMP off, although it saw no major impact on traffic its new users saw a âsignificant dropâ of around 40% to 50%. This almost led to a decision to bring back AMP because of concerns from the editorial team, Smullen said.
âSo we were going to have those conversations where we were going to bring back AMP and then right around that mark, Google then came out with an announcement that it would be starting to fully roll out the page experience update⊠Iâm not joking, on 4 June the minute that they said in that announcement it was going to happen our traffic literally just came back.â
After that point, traffic was higher than it was before AMP.
Smullen acknowledged: âIf you have AMP right now, unless thereâs a business decision why you donât need AMP as a publisher, thereâs no real major requirement to get rid of it because it still works, and it still will work.â
He added that for many publishers, especially smaller local titles, âadopting AMP almost overnight sped up their website and gave them a faster user experience. So to get rid of AMP and to actually put the investment into speeding up your website would actually cost more money in terms of development resourcesâ.
However a key business reason to ditch it was the Independentâs continued move towards a subscription-based online model as the AMP cache continually logged people out of their subscription accounts because of the way it is hosted on Google servers.
As a result, the Irish Independent was losing subscribers who were frustrated by the user experience, Smullen said. In addition, with AMP it would be unable to personalise its subscribersâ homepage experiences.
He added that the Independentâs developers were âdelightedâ to get rid of AMP because of its limitations on what you can build with HTML and Javascript. Ad teams were also happy because they can now have different ad formats and sell different packages for mobile.
Although digital ad revenue is less important to the Independent than subscriber revenue, Smullen said the outlet was also seeing a higher yield on advertising because away from AMP it does not have to meet Googleâs criteria but can use its own network providers.
The Belfast Telegraph in particular saw ad revenue âtankâ when it first launched AMP because some of its ad network providers were not compatible. Now, yields have greatly improved, Smullen said.
âItâs kind of been win-win all round from online advertising to subscribers and then thereâs been no impact on traffic. So yeah, itâs been a real positive experience all round,â Smullen said.
He added: âI could probably predict that most publishers that do have subscription models will probably move away from AMP, but those who donât have a subscriber model and rely on online advertising, I think theyâll stick with AMP.â
SEO expert Budka speculated following a âquick inspectionâ that The Telegraph, which is concentrating on a âsubscriber-firstâ strategy, may be the only major UK news outlet that has so far stopped bothering with AMP.
âThey must have assessed traffic following the page experience update and decided it doesnât make a difference,â Budka said. âYouâd imagine the others will follow suit at some point rather than maintain a defunct format.â
A Telegraph spokesperson declined to comment. Digital subscriber behemoths New York Times and the Washington Post, both of which Press Gazette understands may be considering a move away from AMP, also did not comment.
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