From Advertising Age:
Facebook hasn’t lost the war against Google for publishers’ content, but it looks like it’s losing one fight.
The company said Thursday that it’s created a software extension that lets publishers easily transfer content formatted for its Instant Articles to the No. 1 competition for mobile readers in a hurry, Google AMP.
AMP pages load near instantaneously, get prime real estate in Google search results, and have seen widespread adoption from both publishers and ecommerce players such as eBay and 1800Flowers. (Pages that load faster often lead to an uptick in sales.)
Unlike AMP pages, Instant Articles keep the user on Facebook. The benefit for publishers is that their content loads faster.
Publishers can sell ads in too, so in theory there’s no loss of revenue opportunity. But Facebook’s latest move underscores earlier reports that publishers have grown frustrated with the Instant Articles format.
The New York Times, for example, has completely pulled out from Instant Articles. The Guardian said last month that it was also dropping the format.
. . . .
Google said last week that there are more than 1.7 billion AMP pages on 860,000 domains, with 35 million new pages being created each week.
Link to the rest at Advertising Age
If you’ve never heard of AMP before, Here’s a link to more info.
AMP’s basic promise is to load web pages very quickly on smart phones, tablets, etc. Google’s interest is that, the faster pages load, the more likely people are to see Google advertising embedded on various and sundry websites, including news websites.
In 2016, for the first time, more users accessed the web via mobile devices than via desktop. Google says 61 percent of users are unlikely to return to a mobile site they had trouble accessing.
While PG hasn’t seen any promises from Google for AMP-enabled sites, as a general proposition, websites that load more quickly receive higher rankings in Google search results than slow-loading websites.
AMP is supposed to play nicely with WordPress and there are several AMP plugins available. PG just installed AMP for WP – Accelerated Mobile Pages which also installs AMP, another WordPress plugin. The install happened without any hitches.
TPV does not have a mobile-friendly theme (something he needs to fix), but after PG installed the two AMP plugins listed above, TPV appeared to load faster on PG’s iPhone. If anyone has problems, feedback, etc., on mobile access to TPV, feel free to mention it in the comments.
Looking good on my IPhone 6, PG thank you as I use my phone for reading all the time
I use WPtouch Pro plugin. Have you tried that one? Been using it for a few years and have been very happy with it. There is an option to add AMP to it. I just did that too. Very easy.
Thanks Robert, I’ll check it out.
The reason FB IA lost to AMP is that Instant Articles required you to format the articles for IA – manually, in some cases – and then fed them into FB’s maw.
I can do AMP with a plugin, and the content sits on my site.
“The reason FB IA lost to AMP is that Instant Articles required you to format the articles for IA – manually, in some cases – and then fed them into FB’s maw.
I can do AMP with a plugin, and the content sits on my site.”
And FB wonders why I haven’t been there in over a year. 😉
Coincidentally, this site is unusable on a smartphone.
Any plans to update the theme?
As indicated my commentary, I need to do that, Nate.
The theme I’ve used forever isn’t mobile-friendly and the theme’s creator isn’t interested in doing anything about that.
When I’ve polled users about changing the theme, feedback has been negative.
I’ve tried a couple of WP plugins that automatically create a mobile-friendly version of the current TPV theme, but those were not reliable.
Any suggestions would be appreciated.
Ah. The version of the post i read in your RSS feed didn’t include that detail.
It stopped at:
“AMP is supposed to play nicely with WordPress and there are several AMP plugins available (which PG hasn’t tried).”
As for your theme, it looks like the developer is out of business, o you’ll need to look elsewhere.
What were the objections to changing th themes?
I updated the post after it went out on the RSS feed, Nate. Sorry for the confusion.
The objections were mainly that they liked the look of the current theme, found it easy to read. Nothing more specific than that.
I’ve searched for newer themes with a similar look, but wasn’t able to find any. Thinking about it since your first comment, I may have to purchase a configurable theme and make up a look myself.
PG, I recommended WPtouch Pro in a comment below, and if you need a new theme, I highly recommend this one: https://wordpress.org/themes/atahualpa/
It’s free, highly customizable, and I’ve used it for many years.
That’s a pretty theme.