Dive Brief:
- At New York’s AMP developer conference, it was announced Google’s optimized mobile pages now include China’s Baidu and Sogou search engines representing 90% of the region’s search market as well as Yahoo Japan per an AMP HTML blog post.
- The international expansion onto the largest Asia Pacific search engines brings AMP a new audience of more than one billion.
- The blog post also highlighted news from some existing partners like LinkedIn, which reports seeing a 10% increase in time spent in AMP articles and Tumblr, which is planning to expand its commitment to AMP, bringing it to all of its more-than 300 million blogs in the coming weeks.
Dive Insight:
Google launched AMP in October 2015 as an open source project to improve the performance of mobile pages and since that time has continued to grow in adoption as well as spurring technology creation from developers. Adding the three biggest search engines in the Asia Pacific region is a major step in bringing an AMP optimized mobile web to users across the globe.
While AMP is being embraced for its strong mobile user experience, However, publishers have expressed concerns that the initiative impacts revenue potential because of its limits on ad inventory and formats like video. Google will likely try to address some of these concerns at its AMP developers conference this week. Yesterday's blog post provided an update on the expansion of the AMP framework to ads. For example, native ad exchange Triplelift is delivering ads 3x lighter that load 6x times faster than traditional mobile ads and increase CTRs and eCPMs 13% per the post.
Google needs to continue driving innovation for AMP as competition for mobile-friendly content is growing. Facebook's offering, Instant Articles, is doing well and expanding. Additionally, consumers are engaging with content from publishers on Snapchat Discover and other platforms.