Scott Services: Two years on, mixed reports on AMP adoption

Wednesday, 19 December 2018

Two years on, mixed reports on AMP adoption

LaterPay, a company that builds tools to help publishers AMPlify and monetize their content weighed in this week on the overall progress it’s seeing with the uptake of the standard on the web. While major media organizations have embraced AMP, there’s been a more gradual uptake for smaller organizations who lack the resources of the giants.

“We continue to be amazed at how slowly the industry is moving to leverage AMP,” wrote Cosmin-Gabriel Ene, LaterPay’s CEO, on a post on the official AMP website today. “After launching with our first customers in the U.S. this year, and we wanted to encourage publishers to more embrace the solution and to share the lessons that we at LaterPay have learned when it comes to implementing new and innovative approaches to subscription growth.”

He went on to list three important factors publishers need to consider to be successful with AMP.

Publishers should consider new monetization strategies. The industry needs to embrace the opportunity that technology companies offer, rather than being more focused on explaining the reasons for failure (as Ene believes they currently appear to be).

With great user experience driving AMP adoption, publishers should embrace technologies that bridge AMP and HTML. Even though AMP is the future for publishers, HTML is not going away any time soon.

Publishers should leverage AMP to engage and convert consumers into paying customers. While it’s mostly larger publishers that are seeing success in monetizing AMP content, Ene says that smaller publishers are gradually seeing benefits from their AMP efforts.

Not everyone is enamored with AMP. In The AMP is a lie, Search Engine Land columnist and IBM SEO specialist Patrick Stox takes a contrarian stance — questioning even whether AMP pages are actually faster than other well-optimized pages — illustrating his arguments with numerous technical details. It’s well worth a read if you’re considering implementing AMP. Others are critical of the development resources required for a successful implementation and worry about the unintended consequences of essentially having two versions of your site out there (the regular responsive site and the AMP version).

Separately, AddThis recently released Share Buttons available as an AMP component. The company’s Share Buttons come with more than 200+ global social networks and services, auto-personalized for a website visitors. The buttons are also customizable to match your design needs.

Why you should care. Over the past two years, the Google-backed AMP Project has been gaining traction. Most recently, as we reported on Marketing Land last week, the official AMP plugin for WordPress was released, marking a resounding endorsement from the world’s most popular content management system. If you are a publisher or advertiser, embracing AMP provides a lightning-fast user experience across all platforms.

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