GOOGLE HAS BROUGHT VISUAL STORYTELLING TO THE OPEN WEB THROUGH ITS NEW AMP STORY FORMAT, EXPANDING ON THE AMP (ACCELERATED MOBILE PAGES) PROJECT.
Providing content publishers with a mobile-focused format for delivering news and information as visually rich, tap-through stories, the new AMP story is very similar to that seen on both Snapchat and Instagram.
To make news telling more interactive, some stories are best told with text while other are best expressed through images and videos. To help keep their readers’ attention, publishers use images, videos and graphics to keep them engaged through immersive and easily consumable visual information. This is because, on mobile devices, users browse a lot of articles, but rarely engage.
Let Creators Focus on Storytelling
The mobile web is great for distributing and sharing content, but mastering the performance can be tricky. As we have discussed in previous blogs, images and videos on mobile can slow page speed down, which in turn can land you with a penalty and a drop in rankings. So, getting these key details right often poses prohibitively high startup costs, particularly for small publishers.
To combat this, AMP stories are built on the technical infrastructure of AMP to provide a fast experience on the mobile web. Just like any web page, a publisher hosts an AMP story HTML page on their site and can link to it from any other part of their site to drive discovery. And, as with all content in the AMP ecosystem, discovery platforms can employ techniques like pre-renderable pages, optimised video loading and caching to optimise delivery to the end user.
To make the production of AMP stories as quick and easy as possible from a technical perspective, the format comes with preset, but flexible, layout templates, standardised UI controls and components for sharing and adding follow-on content.
Google Copying Snapchat & Instagram?
Users of Snapchat and Instagram are aware that interactive storytelling isn’t anything new, as it’s been available on both platforms for quite some time now. So, is Google’s new AMP story really that inventive?
At first glance, AMP story follows a very similar structure to that seen on Snapchat and Instagram; a series of interactive pages that can include sound, moving images and even video. The main focus for publishers is to get readers to interact with both its stories and its brand.
As of Q4 2017, Snapchat had 187 million daily active users, with Instagram topping that with 500 million. That’s a lot of users that publishers can reach daily with updated content, but surely Google can further eclipse those numbers?
Whilst the search engine never discloses its mobile search numbers, we estimate it to be topping 1 billion, but just how many of them will interact with the new AMP story will hopefully become clearer in the following months.
We tried to discover these new AMP stories on our mobile devices, but to no avail. It looks like it is only available in the US with stories coming from major US news outlets. We expect the service to hit the UK soon with the likes of Sky News, The Sun, The Guardian and BBC being the first to share AMP stories. We will keep a close eye on the SERPs in the coming days and weeks.
