Waiting for websites to load is so last year and that is why Facebook started this trend with their Instant Articles platform. Content creators choose the content they want to be published on Facebook and people will be able to read it just like how they would view it on the website, only faster.
Google noticed what Facebook was doing and decided to announce Accelerated Mobile Pages, their own version of Instant Articles that is slightly different from Instant Articles in one aspect: It is open source.That announcement was made at the beginning of the year and now they have given a timeline to the actual launch of AMP.
David Besbris,Google’s Vice President of Engineering said in the blogpost: “Google will begin sending traffic to your AMP pages in Google Search early next year and we plan to share more concrete specifics on timing very soon.” They have to play catchup with Facebook where they launched officially on May and gradually rolling it out to iPhone users and for Android users in India.
On October, Google divulged that they had 30 publishers on board the AMP platform and as of now, it has grown to 1600 publishers who apparently have “voiced their support.” AMP is open source and the search giant says that “more than 4,500 developers are following the AMP Project’s ongoing engineering discussions on Github.”
Next year will be pivotal for instantaneous web pages in several fronts:
- Will the revenue generated be motivating enough for publishers to continue using them?
- Will it change the reading habits of internet users?
- Will it significantly boost the page views of the publishers?
