We disabled Google AMP at Tribune Publishing

https://kurtgessler.medium.com/what-happened-when-we-disabled-google-amp-at-tribune-publishing-2fa65a2f2a40

by danso • 4 years ago

263 104 4 years ago

kurtgessler.medium.com

s17n2• 4 years ago

Tribune Publishing's websites are hot garbage and a perfect example of why we need AMP in the first place.

jacquesm2• 4 years ago

No, that's not why we need AMP. They should just fix the garbage.

callahad• 4 years ago

"Just fix the garbage" doesn't work; it's there because someone in favor of the garbage wanted it there, and the folks opposed to the garbage didn't have the authority or influence to stop it.

...and that's the one thing AMP did right: it empowered developers to push back against the garbage by giving them a big ol' "Google says no" sign to wave around. Which is all kinds of problematic in terms of existential threats to the Open Web, but it did clean up that specific type of garbage.

How do we give anti-garbage folks that same power in a post-AMP world, without resorting to centralized authority?

chiefalchemist2• 4 years ago

If sites were "just fixing the garbage" Google wouldn't have had a reasonable reason for rolling out AMP.

I presume to some extent AMP was intended to be like Google Fiber. That is a kick in the pants to get others to up their game. It didn't work out that way.

The truth is too many sites are done with an all-about-the-brand mindest. And users are a distant second in the priority list. I'm not sure what the answer is. Sure, obviously, it's not AMP. But we still need something. Users - which is all of us - are being abused.

karamanolev• 4 years ago

Be that as it may, we need to get rid of AMP altogether. It's a much bigger evil than a bad website here or there. After AMP is gone, we can worry about one (or N) bad websites instead of a corp controlling all of them.

aliqot• 4 years ago

Yep, perfection it isn't, but this is a step in the right direction. Hopefully, the initiative that brought this forward also slowly rectifies the other issues with the site.

khatkhati• 4 years ago

I don't know what you're talking about, they are nice, clean and snappy with JavaScript turned off :)))))

gerdesj• 4 years ago

Whatevs with respect to Tribune (whom I've never heard of). You may not like their message but AMP is the messenger here and it is Minerva's kid brother that flunked school and took up delivering class A drugs on their BMX.

This article is about dumping AMP - discuss! I found the medium article extremely well written with loads of stats to back up assertions. It is also mercifully short. That is exactly what I want to see.

For me AMP is an example of "insidious" - it looks shiny ("my precious") but it will suck the life out of you eventually. AMP, fundamentally puts your content distribution in the hands of a third party (G) that can change it at will and that breaks the promise of the web and ensures that you will have your testes tickled at first and then twisted off.

AMP is not simply a CDN - it doesn't simply regurgitate your stuff faster. It changes it and does things to it and also gathers as much data as it wishes, from your customers. My Precious ...

Oh look: I've managed to conflate some fictional seriously damaged goods from Star Wars and the Lord of the Rings with what Google will do to you.

Silly me.

karaterobot• 4 years ago

Did AMP improve the experience of Tribune Publishing websites? If it's hot garbage with AMP, removing it shouldn't hurt. But it will give them the ability to improve their sites rather than being locked into Google's choices.

nightpool2• 4 years ago

Yes, AMP does (or at least did) generally improve the UX and the load time of most pages that integrated it. No giant blobs of third party ad scripts, no huge interstitials that took over the entire page... Whatever else you might say about AMP, it did a good job at handcuffing publishers into not ruining their site with garbage

standyro• 4 years ago

When I worked for Tribune (before the LA Times got sold off) it was a hot mess of adtech garbage like Taboola that nobody had the guts to get rid of.

tomcam2• 4 years ago

Funny, I was going to post something snarky b/c TFA was attractive and easy to read. Since the author works for Chicago Tribune I went to the site and... not at all bad, considering the commercial constraints legacy media is stuck with.

s17n2• 4 years ago

I agree, considering the constraints, it's not bad. The problem is the constraints, and whatever you think about AMP, at least it was an attempt to tackle this problem head on.

wilde• 4 years ago

Good riddance. AMP pages loaded noticeably more slowly for me and were typically broken when they finally painted.

vonwoodson• 4 years ago

Hear, hear!

robbyking• 4 years ago

And it disables the browser's find functionality. It's such a core piece of functionality, I'm really surprised it's been broken for this long.

account422• 4 years ago

Broken? If you manually have to scan across the page you will see more ads. Corporations don't deserve the benefit of the doubt.

nightpool2• 4 years ago

The whole point of the Core Web Vitals project was to provide a neutral measure of "quality" that could replace the search rankings boost that AMP got, so I'm not surprised. I just wish they did something about giant interstitials as well

dspillett2• 4 years ago

… yet they still use medium, with its collection of problems.

The article doesn't state how the graphs are produced. I hope they are stacked rather than plain lines, otherwise the comment that people transitioned to normal mobile access is wrong and those visits just vanished.

joebob42• 4 years ago

I think they must be stacked based on their description of amp as most of their traffic when it's the lowest line, but I agree the graph design is bewildering and does not read to me as stacked without thinking hard about what they are saying.

dspillett2• 4 years ago

Yeah, I assume they are stacked. But they could do with better design to make that obvious (it isn't at all without inferring from the text) or some clarification in the text (or just with the graph key).

ProAm• 4 years ago

The irony of disabling AMP but posting about it on Medium.

hiccuphippo• 4 years ago

I really wanted AMP to be to HTML/CSS what asm.js was to Javascript, a subset with better performance.

What other alternatives are there? The Gemini project seems too barebones and requires its own browser.

dheera• 4 years ago

I actually kind of liked AMP because it regularly circumvented paywalls and those fucking annoying newsletter popups.

waynesonfire• 4 years ago

Makes sense. That must have been the "loss of control over user experience" that publishers complained about.

arcticbull• 4 years ago

Unfortunately it hijacked scrolling, navigation and search which more than made up for the lack of annoying newsletter popups.

I personally use the Amplosion plug-in for Safari on iOS which nukes AMP pages from orbit transparently, substituting their standard variant. [1]

[1] https://amplosion.app

busymom0• 4 years ago

I use archive dot org and archive dot is for bypassing paywall. The dot org one works best usually in sites with JavaScript.

AlexCoventry• 4 years ago

I liked it because it dangled the possibility of author signatures on content, via RealURL.

tomcam2• 4 years ago

What other alternatives are there?

1. Fantastic content. If you have that pretty much nothing else matters.

2. Hand-tuned CSS and HTML

hyperhopper• 4 years ago

Also, a lot of AMP isn't even bad. You can self-host the js for it, follow the spec and restrictions, etc, and still get all the speed upsides except for the js being cached from Google.

I've done this on many personal websites and it is a easy brainless way to get a fast simple site.

shakow• 4 years ago

What other alternatives are there?

Correctly design your website.

Website obesity is a human problem, not a technical one. If asm.js solved a technical problem, AMP is basically just a very strict and unavoidable linter.

MaxBarraclough• 4 years ago

The kind of people who publish on Gemini are the kind who already made their website fast.

The way I see it, Google just need to penalise bloated websites far more harshly. There's no real technical challenge here - we already have fast browsers. The challenge is one of incentives.

mushprom• 4 years ago

I thought that Google was retiring AMP anyways?

tyingq• 4 years ago

Sort of. They removed the only real reason people used it...

"AMP will no longer be necessary for stories to be featured in Top Stories on mobile; it will be open to any page"

But they didn't announce anything about retiring it. It's still there if you want it for some other reason.

sgammon2• 4 years ago

Weird that giving google all your traffic didn't end up boosting your own bottom line /s

sgammon2• 4 years ago

Sarcasm aside,I feel like AMP was the first time Google violated their promise to users, and to their own ecosystem. "Make the web fast" was Google's way of keeping up with native performance in iOS's walled garden, before Android came into its own. Obviously this same strategy is important for Workspace's competitiveness against Office, pre MS365.

But with AMP, Google's promise mutated into something which had no exchange in value: Google said, "We'll serve your content, we'll make it fast. You don't even need to sustain the traffic, we'll do that for you. It's the ultimate fast."

But then, Google turned around and cost-extracted that same market into semi-permanent chaos. This promise to users ("we both win when the web is fast") was borrowed and manipulated to Google's benefit and the publisher's detriment, and, in essence, became, "look at me; I am the [publisher] now. Here are your GA stats for the traffic we decided to send you today for your content."

I'm not even sure as a user that I care about AMP. So what, articles were faster for awhile. You could have accomplished the same thing for almost no money with a desktop version of Google Reader, but here we are.

Apotheos• 4 years ago

I know we dumped AMP at The Daily Beast because revenue per page view went down significantly enough to negate any supposed benefits of using it.

If I remember correctly pageviews didn't increase when we used it, which was the idea as google would rank us higher.

tootie• 4 years ago

My news site dumped AMP late last year also. We were doing a replatform and just didn't carry it over. Didn't see any appreciable changes in traffic or user behavior.

ec1096856• 4 years ago

Problem with turning off AMP, it’s generally replaced with a page with even more ads, so the user suffers in that aspect.

paulcole3• 4 years ago

Ads aren’t bad. They’re a way to get content without needing to exchange money for it.

The user suffer more when the content goes away.

gamblor956• 4 years ago

Ads pay for the content.

Do you think that journalists just work for free?

kevin_thibedeau2• 4 years ago

Ads themselves aren't the core problem. It's the 10's of megabytes of superfluous javascript you're expected to download to read content with primarily text presentation. Put the marketing departments on the ark ship along with the telephone sanitizers and we'll all be better off.

youngtaff2• 4 years ago

Problem is that adtech companies are extracting all the value from the news market

There seems to be a huge gap between what ad buyers pay, and what publishers receive (one study showed The Guardian got as little at 10c for each $ spent) so publishers end up adding nore ads to try to compensate

oliwarner4• 4 years ago

AMP never limited you from doing all that; it's just the method that is tweaked.

In my experience if a publisher chooses to make their main website a trash fire, their AMP version is too.

Nothing stopping a publisher doing their website right. Even with advertising: manage inventory first-party, don't track users off-site, base your ads on content.

jjulius4• 4 years ago

Speaking of AMP and ads, fun fact! If you block ads, AMP purposely ads a few second delay to load all AMP pages. So in your scenario, the winning option is to install an ad blocker and avoid all AMP pages. :)

ahoy• 4 years ago

When I joined Talking Points Memo, AMP was the new "hot" thing. I fought hard to stop us from jumping on that train and I'm glad I did.

yyyk2• 4 years ago

Google already controls the most important browser and the biggest search engine. AMP let them also run javascript on every AMP site, ability to de facto become for host for most AMP users and a justification for dictating what your site did + excuse for manipulating search results. The web would have begun to turn into a closed system like Facebook. Fortunately Google did not have the strength to complete their design.

zagrebian• 4 years ago

Fortunately Google did not have the strength to complete their design.

Google was telling from the start that AMP was only a temporary solution, and that the end-goal of AMP is to disappear.

acdha2• 4 years ago

Corporate marketing says lots of things which they don’t mean. Google actually required you to use AMP to get the best results placement and they took many years to implement solution-neutral alternatives which would have been easier to do in the first place. It’s really hard to believe they seriously intended to spend all of that extra developer time and strong-arm publishers on a temporary measure.

yyyk2• 4 years ago

Google always treated AMP as permanent, even going as far as to introduce AMP Emails*, and slowing down non-AMP javascript content. It was only because of legal exposure created by the slowdown that they were forced to deemphasize AMP.

* Nothing says 'temporary' more than introducing a tech to a form of communication which is expected to remain readable basically forever.

ec1096856• 4 years ago

The mobile web version they replaced amp with is awful: https://www.baltimoresun.com/education/bs-md-student-voting-...

https://www.baltimoresun.com/news/crime/bs-md-ci-cr-timothy-...

Interstitial pay walls, auto playing video ads that are pinned to the top, useless read more button, horrible tabula ads. It’s a total mess.

jjcon• 4 years ago

I’d take a root canal over AMP any day of the week - this is still way better than the crap google been pushing

ec1096856• 4 years ago

Do you run with an ad blocker by chance?

cratermoon• 4 years ago

I had forgotten that AMP was still a think after installing the AMP to HTML extension for Chrome. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/redirect-amp-to-ht...

BobMit• 4 years ago

Great decision, especially since AMP no longer plays a privileged role in search results.

annyyy2• 4 years ago

I turned it off on my news site and unfortunately the ratings plummeted. Do you have any advice?

annyyy2• 4 years ago

We disabled Google AMP at Tribune Publishing

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