Google AMP adoption brings performance gains for some news outlets

Google today released new information about the impact that its open-source Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) technology has had on some media outlets. The move comes one year after Google first publicly introduced the project.

The Daily Dot, Gizmodo, the Miami Herald, Slate, and Wired, among others, have seen improvements in certain metrics since making their articles compliant with AMP, according to newly published case studies.

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The case studies show that:

• 90 percent of AMP traffic to the Daily Dot is from new visitors.
• More than 80 percent of AMP traffic to Gizmodo is from new visitors, while they represent less than 50 percent in all mobile sessions. Plus, the number of impressions per page view on an AMP Gizmodo page is 50 percent higher than on a non-AMP page.
• People visiting AMP pages from the Miami Herald through mobile searches spend 10 percent more time than people who access the newspaper’s regular mobile pages.
• Slate has seen a 44 percent jump in monthly unique visitors from Google searches, and visits per monthly unique user are up 73 percent.
• Click-through rates (CTRs) on ads on Wired AMP pages are 63 percent higher than on non-AMP pages, and CTRs from search results are 25 percent higher.

Separately, the Verge said today that AMP pages now constitute 14 percent of its traffic. “You could, at this time, make a solid argument that AMP is the future of the web,” wrote the Verge’s editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel.

Media outlets aren’t the only ones that have adopted AMP. Google has started using it for some of its services, along with eBay, Pinterest, Reddit, and other companies. Earlier today, Automattic, the company behind the WordPress open-source content management system (CMS), announced that it has rolled out new tools that people can use to adjust the look of the AMP pages for blogs hosted on WordPress.com.