I really liked AMP as a client side framework, and I think it had a lot going for it in terms of guiding you into a performant experience with good UX for mobile devices. Plus, the restrictions on floating elements and third party JavaScript have done a ton to improve ad quality on mobile web. I don't think we get there without Google or another similarly-powerful browser/aggregator coalition really working together to provide the right incentives to publishers.
I used to work in a newspaper’s digital department. From the outside, I can see why AMP might look good. “Faster loading times, higher engagement from ads, and an SEO boost? What’s not to love?” From the inside though, this adds a lot of overhead to sites that are usually old, patchwork, and very complicated. Essentially, the dev team has to have two entirely separate tracks now, one for regular ads and one for AMP. If you have an advertising department, this gets even more annoying since AMP does not allow as much customization of ads as papers are used to (header vs side vs footer vs text-only vs sponsored posts vs in-article, etc.). Not to mention, the main “incentive” problem in the journalism industry right now is not invasive ads, it’s ads and clickbait in general, which AMP doesn’t help with. Most papers don’t want to have to tailor headlines for Twitter, Facebook, and a million other sites and venues. They don’t want to have to deal with ads, but something needs to pay to run the site and no one likes paying for news. Only extremely large players like NYT or financial papers can pull that. So I don’t like when Google says this “helps publishers.” That’s not their goal, that’s just marketing speak. Their goal is to make browsing Google a better experience, going so far to define a Google-Approved HTML Spec and cache your content on their servers. Just my 2 cents. Maybe some newer players in the game do like AMP.
As someone who has maintained an AMP implementation for a big (albeit non-news) site for years, I think "AMP does not allow as much customization of ads as papers are used to" is a feature, not a bug. There are constant demands from sales and advertising partners to add more and more disruptive and broken web experiences, and having a bedrock of "Google will penalize us if we do this" to fall back on is really, really important.
I don't care whether AMP "helps publishers"—I think AMP holds publishers accountable for their (accidental or careless) UX disasters, and prevents them from happening in the first place.
The way I see it, the constant pressures from ads departments is the issue and having to make an appeal to Google is not a good solution. We should not have to rely on having Google back us up on what constitutes a “good” page. So, I don’t agree that it’s “really, really important.” If anything, it’s a sad picture of digital journalism. I think what’s really, really important is having the freedom to design your site without having to worry about Google’s arbitrary judgment of that design and not needing to rely on pleasing a search engine to show up in its results.
AMP definitely does not hold anyone accountable. Look at Reddit. Absolutely atrocious UX after AMP from what is just a basic forum. Instead, AMP makes everyone - regardless of content, design, or purpose - obey the same Google-approved standard of design, using Google-approved fonts and Google-approved CSS. In my view, AMP is the UX disaster because I hate the way it looks and have to remove the AMP from every news article I read. Oftentimes, publishers have a better idea of how their content should look than Google does. Especially smaller ones which have a strong focus on design.
This is just completely false. You can use webfonts and custom CSS on AMP. There are some common-sense limitations, like limiting the total size of the CSS, but I've never run into an issue where I had a design that I couldn't achieve on AMP due to CSS constraints.
> the constant pressures from ads departments is the issue
The problem is that sales departments don't work in isolation—they're beholden to the broader pressures of the marketplace. It's a classic coordination problem—the industry is caught in a race-to-the-bottom of ad quality, and as long as you can make a few extra bucks per month by adding more and more intrusives ads, you're going to do so. Google has the ability to set different incentives for publishers, because they control a lot of traffic, which turns into revenue.
I mean relying on a massive corporation's total dominance over the web and semi-arbitrary rules for reward and punishment in order to tell the "business" side of your company no isn't exactly something I would be touting as a positive thing.
All of this crap is because sw engineers don't have a professional association with an ethics board. Can you imagine if you could put the experience of your users first and tell your business to fuck off when they ask for this nonsense secure that they really can't just fire you and find someone who will sell out.
I invite you to find any ethics board in the world that would speak out against "I made my company $10MM more yearly by causing the page to load 3 seconds slower for all of our users, with janky scrolling and popup ads". I mean, frankly, that's a very utilitarian calculation—think about just the simple case of a business saving money by removing their caching layer. Who is to say how many seconds of performance deoptimization is worth how many dollars of saved cost? If it only cost users 0.1 seconds in the median case and 1 seconds in the 95th percentile case, and you saved $1MM yearly, would you make that call?
If AMP only was a stricter subset of HTML with some limits on page size I don't think the backlash would be so hard. Instead it's a framework that includes massive overhead, third party dependencies, explicit carve-outs for ads and a unnecessary 7 second load delay if you choose not to load their js.
EDIT: Also built in scroll-jacking, hiding the actual origin of the content, and a bunch of other anti-features.
This is one of those things where google might have started with a good idea, but the reasonable person left the room after a single-sentence pitch and left it up to whatever braintrust of marketers and LOC-counting managers stayed.
