Two seconds is all you get before your readers start bouncing off your website if the page they requested does not load.

Seems unrealistic? Fine, give it three seconds, but now you’re really gambling—roughly 40% of users will leave, and then it only goes downhill from there.

Page abandonment is a terrible incident for publishers: It increases bounce rate, decreases ad revenue, and generally throws a wet towel on all their hard work.

Page abandonment is bad news for ad networks too: It translates to lower commissions and when this happens on a large scale, the losses really adds up.

The largest of all these ad networks, AdSense, happens to be owned by Google—and being one of the foremost tech companies in the world, they decided to fix this situation by launching AMP.

What is AMP?

AMP is an open source project based on AMP HTML, a new open framework built out of existing web technologies, which allows websites to build light-weight webpages. The primary goal of the project is to speed up the delivery of content on all mobile devices by stripping away all that is unessential.

Today, after discussions with publishers and technology companies around the world, we’re announcing a new open source initiative called Accelerated Mobile Pages, which aims to dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web. We want webpages with rich content like video, animations and graphics to work alongside smart ads, and to load instantaneously. We also want the same code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can appear everywhere in an instant—no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you’re using. — Google Official Blog

Perhaps the biggest selling point of Google AMP is that it’s open source, and therefore any publisher can sign up and start using it, unlike other more tightly controlled projects such as Facebook’s Instant Articles and Apple News.

Is AMP Really That Fast?

Yes it is.

Jon Parise from Pinterest says, “Accelerated Mobile Pages load four times faster and use eight times less data than traditional mobile-optimized pages.”

You’ll notice the difference instantly as you open an AMP article—there’s no lag, no waiting for individual elements to load, no jittery movements on the page—the entire content of the page is delivered in one smooth motion and seems like a far cry from the regular webpages on the mobile web.

Does it have functionalities required to build webpages?

AMP is both a superset and subset of HTML5. Hence, it supports most of the tags and it offers various native solutions for missing features such as

Twitter Component

I only needed to change some CSS. https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DnttLOyU8AASYiK.jpg

— Yomesh Gupta (@yomeshgupta) September 22, 2018

YouTube Component

AMP Audio Component

Your browser doesn’t support HTML5 audio

Radio Jingle By - Parth Saini (keysmusicmedia.com)

and many more! Check them out here.

Talk to me about money! Does AMP Support Ads?

This is really the big question for publishers. You’d be happy to know that AMP does indeed support advertising; at least for Google, that’s kind of like the whole point of this exercise anyway.

Ads help fund free services and content on the web. With Accelerated Mobile Pages, we want to support a comprehensive range of ad formats, ad networks and technologies. Any sites using AMP HTML will retain their choice of ad networks, as well as any formats that don’t detract from the user experience. It’s also a core goal of the project to support subscriptions and paywalls. We’ll work with publishers and those in the industry to help define the parameters of an ad experience that still provides the speed we’re striving for with AMP. — Google Official Blog

It goes without saying that all things being equal, publishers should see an improvement in ad performance and consequently ad revenue because those 40% or so users who were earlier bouncing off the page will actually stick around now to see the ads.

How Do I Implement AMP?

You’ll need to be familiar with markup to be able to set up an AMP page. I recommend that you take some time out and go through the official AMP tutorial and related guides once—if you’ve never worked with HTML before—this is where you ask your tech savvy friend or coworker to help you out a bit in understanding how this works.

With a little bit of effort, you’ll be able to:

  1. With a little bit of effort, you’ll be able to:
  2. Stage it.
  3. Ensure AMP compliance by using Google’s validator.
  4. Publish and distribute.

In case you want an one stop solution for your AMP needs—you’re in luck. AdPushup released a product for AMP that dynamically converts all your pages into AMP-compliant versions. This is immensely helpful as it saves you all the legwork. All your posts are instantly AMP-ified.

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