By Dan Barrett
In direct competition with Facebook’s Instant Articles and Apple News, Google has today launched Accelerated Mobile Pages – an advertiser friendly platform that assists publishers in speeding up the load time of their web content without sacrificing revenue-earning display ads.
For publishers, it means that pages are published to their own website, but are accelerated via caches created by Google and other social platforms. Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is platform agnostic and is open to any service which wishes to support it.
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While platforms like Apple News require publishers to adopt a uniform look and feel for their work, AMP has been designed to allow publishers to retain graphical features like display ads and slideshows. Publishers will be able to maintain their existing business models and practices.
Google has worked with a consortium of publishers and tech companies to support the new platform. Among the first group of tech partners are Twitter, Pinterest, WordPress, Adobe Analytics, and LinkedIn.
Publishers supporting the new platform at launch include:
[row][double_paragraph]Abril
Asahi
Atlantic Media
BBC
Buzzfeed
Conde Nast
Daily Mail
The Economist
Editora Globo
El Pais
Fairfax Media
Financial Times
Folha De S.Paulo
Franffurter Allgemeine
Gannett
The Guardian
Hearst
The Huffington Post
La Stampa
Les Echos
Mainichi
Abril
Asahi
Atlantic Media
BBC
Buzzfeed
Conde Nast
Daily Mail
Editora Globo
El Pais
Fairfax Media
Financial Times[/double_paragraph][double_paragraph] The Economist
Folha De S.Paulo
Franffurter Allgemeine
Gannett
The Guardian
Hearst
The Huffington Post
La Stampa
Les Echos
Mainichi
Mashable
McClatchy
Newscorp Australia
Daily News
New York Post
New York Times
NineMSN
NRC
Sankei
The Telegraph
UOL
US News
Vox Media
The Wall Street Journal
The Washington Post
Zeit Online[/double_paragraph] [/row]
While AMP has gone live, it is technically still in preview mode. This means, that readers can only access it if they visit this Google URL or if a publisher links to a page using it.