If you follow industry news or happen to be a web or mobile developer, you’ve likely heard of the Accelerated Mobile Pages Project, or AMP Project. The HTML-based, open source project aims to make mobile pages load instantly on users’ devices while still sticking to existing Open Web standards. AMP is already slated for use upon launch by tons of big names such as Alphabet, Twitter and the New York Times. In order for AMP to work, obviously, it has to support ads. Most of the web runs on ads, up to and including Google’s massive empire that was built on ad-supported search functions. In an announcement made on Monday, January 25, the product manager and the director of global partnerships said that AMP will support ads upon rollout.
On goals for the near future of the project, the announcement pointed to two main goals; “Our goals throughout the process have been twofold: 1) Ensure that AMP works well with the publisher business models of today; and 2) leave lots of room for bold innovation in the future.” This indicates that the standard will likely be left as open as possible as development continues, allowing developers and publishers to keep their content largely as it is now. This move has been praised by numerous partners. Ryan McConville of Kargo said, “Kargo is excited to bring our bespoke mobile ad formats to AMP’s sleek publisher platform. We think the combination will be a win-win for publishers, advertisers and consumers.”
The announcement also indicates that this standard is the beginning of what will turn into a continuing effort to open up and optimize the web in a hand-in-hand process. “We also can’t emphasise enough that this is just the start.”, the announcement states. Noah Szubski, Chief Product Officer at The Daily Mail agrees, saying, “We see AMP as an important early step but expect innovation and for this to be a long term strategy.” The announcement outlines four key points; “Faster is better”, “‘Beautiful’ matters”, “Be safe, be secure” and “We’re better together”, then goes on to state that the project’s managers believe “If we can crack this code, we believe it will help grow the advertising pie for the entire industry”, leaving no doubts as to the direction and spirit of the project.