This post seems to conflate two ideas (1) AMP being an insufficient implementation (update-ping not working, and that being an awkward pattern anyways) and (2) AMP being actively harmful to the web ecosystem in principle.
(1) Comments on the implementation I don't know nearly enough to contest. It's a new technology, and will take a lot of changes in and out of Google to get right. It's also early days - continue raising a stink about things like this and I expect it to get better quick.
(2) The principle of AMP leads to a very interesting discussion. The fact that the top-level URL users go to is not the canonical URL for the page does stray into "breaking the web" territory, at least until it's better supported in browsers. On the other hand, as I understand it that's a technical requirement for AMP to be able to verify the content served through it, which is a requirement in turn for keeping AMP page quality high (in terms of latency, etc, rather than content judgements). Which I think is the most enticing part of AMP, and not something that should be given up lightly.
I see AMP as a possible answer to the tragedy-of-the-commons problems that have resulted from standardizing on third party display ads for monetization, third party scripts for analytics, etc. Giving someone else a hook into your page that isn't incentivized to keep it fast and reliable leads to an end state where publishers have no reason to clean up the experience on their own sites because that'd cost them money, and because the bad experience on every other site prevents them from being commensurately rewarded for being a good player. (E.g. adblockers affect every site equally). And the third party tech providers have no incentive to fix things for similar reasons - alternative providers out there would cause the same poor user experiences anyways, and make more money from doing so and enabling them to sell to publishers better. If we cannot rely on principled actions from publishers or tech providers, how does the experience of the web get better enough broadly?
AMP to me is an answer to that - maybe not the best answer, but the most viable one I've seen so far. It allows for direct control of what is/isn't possible, and if it gains traction may have enough clout to push for some of those better experiences that aren't arising naturally.
The other possible answers I see don't seem to be working better. Relying on regulation seems destined to failure; user experience is too messy to craft rules around, and nobody is placed to enforce them globally. Relying on common gatekeepers seems to be failing - Google algorithm changes worked for a while to incentivize page quality, but I don't think Facebook is (or should?) making equivalent judgements about the quality of content users link to for ranking purposes, and it seems even harder to enforce in other direct-user-sharing sites like Twitter.
[Edit] Disclaimer: I work for Google, in Technical Infrastructure. I used to be in Ads, though not related to AMP.
What is your view on the control Google is exerting over the ad ecosystem here? It is pretty noticeable how the Facebook Audience Network is not an approved network. What about all of the third party analytics providers? Seems a bit lopsided if Google gets all that data and nobody else does, no?
As a buy side guy, I'm worried that this is venturing into anti-competitive monopolistic territory if left unchecked. what are the alternatives for publishers? Don't use AMP and go out of business as your mobile traffic is slowly choked off?
Don't get me wrong, I think publishers dug their own grave here, but this is not the internet I want as a user and as an advertiser. No one company should be able to exert that much control.
Maybe I misread that, but for me it sums AMP up in quite a good way: It's not really about making the web better, it's about more admoney for Google, if a former ads guy has to point out he didn't work on the AMP project there ;)
You read correctly, but it also doesn't tell the full story. I've edited to be "not related to AMP" to try to convey this better.
In short: AMP itself is not part of Ads, but there is a group within Ads focussing on AMP - because one of the biggest blockers to AMP adoption is (was?) getting ads supported within the model.
Although in theory AMP makes sense, I think the issue is actually more broad than just mobile. On desktop, lots of people rely on an ad blocker to make sites usable again. That mobile doesn't have a way to block ads is probably a failure of Google, Apple and other players to allow extensions.
Google has a majority share of the first impression for ads so it's hard for me to really understand how they can't just strong arm other advertisers and other networks into having better ads. Maybe that's the AMP play but it's a pretty weak appeal to consumers and (as evident from this thread) publishers. Ad blockers proliferating are a response to this inaction in my mind.
> That mobile doesn't have a way to block ads is probably a failure of Google, Apple and other players to allow extensions.
To be honest, I see this as short-term painful, long-term desirable. Ad blockers make the incentives of the web worse - they mean that publishers get punished for bad behaviour of other sites. Whereas without, users make more direct value judgements...if your site is covered in ads and a terrible experience, I'll stop visiting it. (I'd accept arguments that 100% ad blocker adoption could push us to a better place so we should let this run its course instead, but when I think it through I think it more likely pushes towards walled gardens and the death of the open web, so I'm skeptical.)
To your second point, I don't think that Google has the power you think it does to strong-arm other ad networks, and that'd be a really dangerous thing for Google to consider doing anyways. Publishers are often struggling right now (especially newspapers), and so revenue is their only thought. They'll go with whoever brings in the most money, because otherwise hastens the death of their company. This is why I like the AMP argument - it isn't forcing anyone, but it makes the argument that "if users can expect a good experience, you'll make more money, in spite of not being able to be as free with the technologies you jam onto the page". Yes, it's a weaker appeal, but that's what I like about it...because it has to be predicated on actually working better, rather than about pushing people around.
> I don't think that Google has the power you think it does to strong-arm other ad networks
Not strong arm per se, but just having _any_ built in enforcement of technical standards built into DFP would solve the lionshare of the problem. At the moment, publishers have to play whack-a-mole with poorly-built creatives.
IAB's LEAN standard would be a fine place to start. (To your point about not pushing people around, I agree, we should be talking about performance as an industry standard, like viewability or HTTPS.)
The catch here is that if DFP were to enforce technical standards to the extent of including performance, publishers would leave en masse. What they want from DFP (as I understand it) is hosting that just works; they don't want anyone in the way causing some ad campaigns to not get trafficked at the right time, or killed after serving for a while, or anything else. And worse, I think that you'd find that a very large number of ads wouldn't comply with any such standard - display ads aren't good, by and large. So even with a perfect offering publishers would look at the numbers and say "you know what, nevermind...turn the crappy ads back on." A pretty good approximation for publishers I've found was to say "if you give them a knob between anything and revenue, they'll turn it towards revenue." That by and large includes sacrificing user-first principles.
So one difference to your example is that viewability is desired - it's a direct metric that helps to approximate value, which advertisers like. But performance is not. Users cannot generally tell _which_ ad made their browser lag, or that it wasn't the page's fault. The best you could possibly do is to measure long-term-value, but because any given publisher only gets a tiny fraction of a user's time, and any single ad that much less, my recollection is that the LTV isn't really moved at all regardless of experience. It's going to take an industry-wide shift to move the needle here.
HTTPS is a closer comparison, except that it takes big parties again to force the issue - it's user positive but revenue negative and lots of work. So it comes back to the issue of who can get this change pushed through, without some party (pubs, advertiser, or users) just walking away. Look at examples of where/why HTTPS has been adopted if you want to see more.
AMP may get to that point, we'll see, but I like it as a possibility. And it's doing more to simply not show ads if they're taking too many resources (with browser assistance iirc? Delay loading? Don't recall what I've read), which is good in other ways.
Which reminds me, that's another plausible solution that I'm liking...if browsers can be more involved in aborting rendering bad iframe'd content, or preventing them from janking the page, etc, then the burden is squarely on the advertisers to fix or suffer reduced impact, irrespective of publisher/ad network. That's great, it puts the incentives cleanly where they should be. So I'm also hopeful that browsers can push through positive results here. Doesn't help with content badness (only latency and other such browser-measurable "bad ad" issues), but is a great starting place. (And to be fair, I don't think AMP solves for content badness either).
That's interesting. I've been working on the publisher side for a long time, and we definitely want technical enforcement. (The devil is in the details. It'd be dumb to automatically block an ad that's 5kb too heavy, but if something is never going to serve because it has mixed content warnings, I'd rather it get switched off and flagged to staff automatically. Otherwise it just wastes inventory until a person notices it.) I can talk in more detail over email if you're interested.
The browser approach is a good idea. It wouldn't even have to break anything, just limit their allotted resources.
I hate to +1 these things but I have had similar experiences with 0 control over the ads that were showing up on a platform. It was a single page app and performance was a huge deal. Often ads didn't even load because of the quality.
Maybe it shouldn't be DFP forcing things as I said, but I think if the controls even existed for publishers it might mean that they tune things to be pleasant for their users such that they get more impressions.
(1) Comments on the implementation I don't know nearly enough to contest. It's a new technology, and will take a lot of changes in and out of Google to get right. It's also early days - continue raising a stink about things like this and I expect it to get better quick.
(2) The principle of AMP leads to a very interesting discussion. The fact that the top-level URL users go to is not the canonical URL for the page does stray into "breaking the web" territory, at least until it's better supported in browsers. On the other hand, as I understand it that's a technical requirement for AMP to be able to verify the content served through it, which is a requirement in turn for keeping AMP page quality high (in terms of latency, etc, rather than content judgements). Which I think is the most enticing part of AMP, and not something that should be given up lightly.
I see AMP as a possible answer to the tragedy-of-the-commons problems that have resulted from standardizing on third party display ads for monetization, third party scripts for analytics, etc. Giving someone else a hook into your page that isn't incentivized to keep it fast and reliable leads to an end state where publishers have no reason to clean up the experience on their own sites because that'd cost them money, and because the bad experience on every other site prevents them from being commensurately rewarded for being a good player. (E.g. adblockers affect every site equally). And the third party tech providers have no incentive to fix things for similar reasons - alternative providers out there would cause the same poor user experiences anyways, and make more money from doing so and enabling them to sell to publishers better. If we cannot rely on principled actions from publishers or tech providers, how does the experience of the web get better enough broadly?
AMP to me is an answer to that - maybe not the best answer, but the most viable one I've seen so far. It allows for direct control of what is/isn't possible, and if it gains traction may have enough clout to push for some of those better experiences that aren't arising naturally.
The other possible answers I see don't seem to be working better. Relying on regulation seems destined to failure; user experience is too messy to craft rules around, and nobody is placed to enforce them globally. Relying on common gatekeepers seems to be failing - Google algorithm changes worked for a while to incentivize page quality, but I don't think Facebook is (or should?) making equivalent judgements about the quality of content users link to for ranking purposes, and it seems even harder to enforce in other direct-user-sharing sites like Twitter.
[Edit] Disclaimer: I work for Google, in Technical Infrastructure. I used to be in Ads, though not related to AMP.