Mobile publishers nervous about aid by Google

Last month, Federico Viticci, who runs MacStories, a news site devoted to Apple and its products, made a change in how the site publishes articles for mobile gadgets. MacStories, he declared, would no longer support a Googlebacked method for faster loading of mobile Web pages.

Viticci said MacStories’ pages loaded quickly without Google’s help. He also didn’t like the idea of Google’s obscuring his site’s links in the interest of expediency.

“Feels good” to no longer use the Google standard, Viticci wrote on Twitter.

Viticci’s experience underscores the ambivalent relationship some Web publishers have developed with what was supposed to be Google’s great boon for mobile publishing. When Google introduced Accelerated Mobile Pages, or AMP, in October 2015, it said the format would help publishers with one of their biggest headaches on smartphones: Browsing mobile websites was so frustratingly slow that many smartphone users abandoned pages before they opened.

AMP has since delivered on its promise of faster mobile pages. Even so, pub-

lishers — of smaller sites, especially, or individual bloggers — are beginning to worry about giving too much control to Google in exchange for zippier Web pages. What’s more, Google’s approach to AMP has rankled some critics already suspicious of the company’s outsize influence on the Internet.

Much of the publishers’ unease is rooted in Google’s presentation of AMP stories, which appear as if they are Google articles. That’s because Google, to speed up AMP, stores copies of publisher’s pages and serves them from its own Internet network. So when a reader clicks an AMP link, the address bar at the top of the page displays www.google.com instead of the publisher’s Web address.

“It looks like a Google story,” said Danny Sullivan, founding editor of Search Engine Land, a Web search news site. “That’s part of the reason why you’re getting the nervousness from some of these publishers.”

Google said that it had designed AMP for speed and that it wants to help — not harm — publishers, who get full accounting of traffic, data and advertising revenue. Publishers also retain control of their content and design. Google said serving up articles from its Internet network was the best way it knew to achieve the AMP speeds, which are as much as four times faster than a regular mobile Web page.

“We always try to present the content that is the best experience,” said David Besbris, Google’s vice president of engineering.

Google started AMP in 2015 because it worried that competitors like Facebook were drawing people into their networks with faster-loading articles and keeping them there. For Google, those rival sites were siphoning people away from the open Internet, where the Mountain View company — which created the Internet’s most valuable property by organizing the expanse of the World Wide Web — typically operates.

The open-source AMP project has won over many big publishers who praise Google’s responsiveness. They say readers are engaging more with ads on AMP because they actually get to the stories and it’s a better experience. There are more than 600 million pages running AMP on more than 700,000 domains, including publishers such as the New York Times and nonmedia sites like eBay.

David Gehring, a former Google employee who is now CEO of Relay Media, a company that works with publishers to convert pages to AMP, said the format had been positive for publishers grappling with shrinking revenue in the shift from print to online advertising. He estimated that up to 10 percent of mobile Web content is on AMP.

Yet Gehring also said Google suffers from “tone deafness” when it came to explaining the benefits of AMP, such as the ability to syndicate articles across the mobile Web without losing advertising or traffic.

That tone deafness has rubbed some publishers the wrong way. In October, software developer Alex Kras created a stir when he wrote a post titled “Google May Be Stealing Your Mobile Traffic,” in which he recounted what had happened when he used AMP on his technology blog. After he enabled AMP on his WordPress publishing software, Kras said, his old posts displayed the Google home page and there was no easy way to redirect readers to his own site.

“It made me feel like my site wasn’t my own,” Kras said.

He later said the title of his post was inaccurate, but stood by his concerns that AMP could cost publishers mobile traffic, an assertion Google denies. Kras said smaller publishers had more to lose if they used AMP, since big publishers have more name recognition and readers are more likely to remember them as the source of a story.

“Little guys like myself don’t have this luxury,” he wrote in a post after meeting with Google officials.

Kras decided to keep AMP because it is fast. “For that, a lot of little things can be (temporarily) forgotten,” he said.

Google may be starting to acknowledge some publishers’ concerns. It told Search Engine Land that it plans to make changes to AMP in 2017 to make it easier for publishers to offer their own links and for readers to be redirected to their sites, but did not elaborate.