You might think Google's launch of AMP (Accelerated Mobile Pages) is a good thing, or you might think it's a bad thing, but whichever side of the debate you fall the only really thing that matters is that it is a thing. A real thing. Available now. Which has just changed the way we publish, whether we like it or not.
It's not just Google's move that matters of course. Google doesn't operate in a vacuum any more than the rest of us and the search giant is counter-striking its rival Facebook while both are responding to a major shift in the way we consume content. E-marketer recently declared that not only would mobile ad-spend overtake print in the UK this year, but that it would overtake TV by next.
We don't all live in the UK of course, but it is a media bellwether and even allowing for the current fuss over iOS 9 and ad blocking there seems little doubt that the money is chasing the mobiles.
Which ups the ante on mobile content, hence Google, Facebook and Apple all rushing to slash load times and improve the user experience. Facebook's Instant Articles promise a tenfold reduction in load times. Apple News hands us an audience and obligingly brushes away those irritating ad blockers.
Google AMP massively accelerates page loading for us and doesn't even demand publishers enter into an agreement, let alone revenue sharing. Fantastic, and good news for the open web which is increasingly being shuttered away behind walled Facebook gardens and apps not least because the experience of browsing on a mobile is as frustrating for everyone else as it was for you when you first tried it.
AMP does come with a catch though. It does a lot of clever things but it also works by substituting its own processes and stripping out embed codes and Javascript that slow pages down. Which means we lose a lot of our analytics on users, a lot of adverts, and a lot of the more creative formats (you can say sayonara to Snowfall on AMP).
Longer term however I suspect we will find other ways of getting statistics, native ad formats that don't rely on scripts, and other creative ways of captivating audiences.
What we won't get rid of, however, is AMP HTML – the series of shortcut codes added to the markup language that enable the page to be loaded faster. Now that AMP HTML is a thing it matters. It matters even if you and your webmaster are laughing because you publish in a parallel existence where mobile phones don't exist.
It matters because Google has never been shy of looking for signs of its own technologies when deciding where your content appears in the search rankings. It matters because although it hesitates to say if AMP pages will be prioritised, it doesn't hesitate to point out that it does prioritise pages that have been optimised for speed. And AMP is all about speed.
So it's a fair bet that if you want your content to be found and displayed prominently then you'd better start learning AMP markup. Which means you want to go back to creating different pages for each platform, your mobile editor (whether they have that title or not) just got to decide on the look of pretty much everything you publish. Which is something you might want to think about when it comes to workflow – now that you're a mobile-first publisher.
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