Monday, January 7, 2019
It is coming to a full year since Google announced the new Visual Stories format using accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) during the AMP Conference in Amsterdam in February of 2018. The Accelerated Mobile Pages Project describes AMP story as:
AMP stories immerse readers in tappable, full-screen content. Building on the possibilities of the AMP project, this format enables the creation of visual content that is fast, open, and user-first.
A handful of publishers signed up to be their trial partners and it is interesting to see how things have progressed a year later.
Since September 2018, as part of making visual content more useful in search, AMP stories appear in a "Visual Story section" in mobile search results. That allows one to see how deeply a publisher is engaging with the format by searching for the publisher's name on a mobile phone* on Google search and see if the Visual Story section appears.
As of 2019-01-17, only two publishers have the visual story section in the search results. The number indicates the position of the visual story in the search results. This results will probably vary over time due to updates from the publishers, how successful the format is, and ultimately if Google search wishes to promote the AMP story format.
The number of AMP stories from each publisher varies, with CNN being the most prolific creator of AMP stories:
The number of stories is an informal tally based mostly on the publisher's stories index page such as https://www.cnn.com/ampstories/. Take this number with a grain of salt.
Regarding the quality of the story, the Washington Post wins hand down with their photojournalistic stories such as Powerless: A photographer’s journey into Yemen’s shattering war. You can also preview the experimental full-screen AMP-story desktop experience there.
The amp-story component is still designated as experimental, and may partly explain the low adoption rate as well as why many AMP story pages have excluded themselves from being indexed by search engine. Making them even rarer in search results. Time will tell if amp-story gain better adoptions when amp-story matures from its experimental status.
I personally like AMP story, even beyond its quirk of not supporting swiping to advance a page. But overall, it does not look like AMP story has proliferated.
Notes
References
From blog.omoiwords.com.
