Google's New AMP Stories Bring Snapchat-like Content to the Mobile Web
February 13 2018 - 12:59AM
Dow Jones News
By Benjamin Mullin
Alphabet Inc.'s Google unveiled new technology that lets
publishers create visual-oriented stories in a mobile-friendly
format similar to the style popularized by Snapchat and
Instagram.
Starting Tuesday, publishers will be able to try out a developer
preview of AMP stories, which feature swipeable slides of text,
photos, graphics and videos, Google announced in a blog post.
Publishers including Vox Media, Condé Nast, Meredith Corp. and
Time Warner Inc.'s CNN were involved in the early development of
the technology and have already begun creating such stories for the
mobile web.
AMP stories are reminiscent of the immersive, vertical stories
pioneered by Snap Inc.'s Snapchat, which spurred copycat features
from social-media rivals. In 2016, Facebook Inc.'s Instagram
launched Instagram Stories, a swipeable product that has also
gained traction among many publishers.
With publishers eager to make money from the rising tide of
consumers viewing content on mobile devices, tech companies also
have introduced products designed to aggregate news and speed the
loading of articles on mobile, including Apple Inc.'s Apple News
app and Facebook's Instant Articles.
Unlike those products, however, AMP stories doesn't yet allow
advertising to be incorporated. Google is in the process of
building support for ads but didn't disclose a time frame.
Meanwhile, the lack of monetization on AMP stories threatens to
slow its adoption among publishers.
Even though creating AMP stories won't pay immediate dividends,
several publishing executives expressed willingness to experiment
with the format in the hopes of an eventual payoff.
"Google has a track record of delivering a return on investment
in the longer run," said Regina Buckley, senior vice president of
digital business development at Meredith, the magazine and online
publisher that recently acquiredTime Inc. "And we're willing to
take a leap of faith on that."
Google's AMP stories format builds on code from its Accelerated
Mobile Pages (AMP) project, a framework that allows publishers to
create webpages that load much faster than conventional pages on
the mobile web. The format has been met with mixed reactions. Some
publishers have praised AMP for sending them additional traffic
from search and speeding up their pages, while others have
criticized the format for being too bare bones to allow for the
full spectrum of digital ads, reducing their revenue per
pageview.
Google is rolling out AMP stories gradually. Beginning Tuesday,
users can find the stories by searching for one of the
participating publishers on Google or following a link on a mobile
browser to a test version of the stories.
Google will monitor reactions to AMP stories over the coming
months and consider integrating them more fully into search, which
could eventually lead to a separate section for AMP stories on a
Google search results page.
Although Google hasn't promised that AMP stories will receive a
bump in search traffic, the prospect of additional readership is
one incentive to try out the technology, said Joe Alicata, chief
product officer at Vox Media. He added that Vox Media would make
the format available to advertisers if ads become supported.
Google paid publishers to help develop the AMP stories
technology, said Rudy Galfi, a product manager at Google. He
declined to say how much or whether the payments will continue,
only that the money helped publishers cover their costs during the
development period. Hearst Corp., Mashable, Mic and the Washington
Post were also involved in the early development of the format.
S. Mitra Kalita, vice president for programming at CNN Digital,
said she hopes CNN will draw additional search traffic with AMP
stories, but she is taking a "wait and see" approach to further
investment.
"I don't look at it in a vacuum," Ms. Kalita said. "We're going
to evaluate it on the revenue, the resources it takes to put out,
the traffic potential and the numbers of users reached."
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
February 13, 2018 00:44 ET (05:44 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2018 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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