Several US publishers are moving away from Google’s AMP framework

Vox Media, BuzzFeed, Complex Networks and BDG are working on alternatives to mobile optimized article pages and moving away from Google’s AMP framework for mobile pages.

That writes The Wall Street Journal. According to the newspaper, the various US publishers are moving away from the AMP framework to be less dependent on Google for advertising. The publishers say they are missing out on advertising revenue due to the AMP framework and are currently testing or considering testing their own framework, writes The Wall Street Journal.

It’s not the first time companies have wanted to get rid of Google’s AMP framework. In November of last year, Twitter decided to stop redirecting users to the AMP version of a website. The company gives no reason for this, but the plan was to phase out the display of AMP pages in a few months. Earlier, The Washington Post also stopped publishing AMP versions of its articles.

AMP stands for Accelerated Mobile Pages and is a project by Google that allows sites to load faster by showing a simplified version, where a lot of code is stripped and not all images and banners are loaded. The framework has been criticized for years. It results in less sales for many media, because fewer advertisements are shown and because the AMP pages are on Google’s server, but contain regular articles from media. Last year’s lawsuit also revealed that Google specifically designed AMP to make it more difficult to auction ad space outside of Google’s Ad Exchange, The Wall Street Journal previously reported.

Vox Media CEO Ryan Pauley says that in addition to advertising revenue, it should also be easier to grow the number of paying subscribers, because websites can then also impose their paywall more easily on mobile. Something that is more difficult via AMP, according to him.