Google’s AMP to take on Facebook’s Instant Articles in contest to load web pages faster

Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) is challenging Facebook’s Instant Articles to determine which program loads web pages faster on mobile devices. The head-to-head starts in early 2016 when Google finally launches Project AMP.

“Google will begin sending traffic to your AMP pages in Google Search early next year, and we plan to share more concrete specifics on timing very soon,” said David Besbris, Vice President of Engineering, Google Search and Richard Gingras, Head of News at Google in a blog post.

The new format will support content like images and videos and a range of advertisement formats. Google also said “Outbrain, AOL, OpenX, DoubleClick, and AdSense are working within the framework.” This will augment the advertising experience for entire ecosystem of users, publishers and advertisers.

“Thousands of publishers have expressed interest in AMP since the preview launched with the likes of the BBC, Sankei, New York Times, News Corp, Washington Post and more,” confirmed Google.

Moreover, the Local Media Consortium (LMC) with more than 70 media companies represented by 1,600 local newspapers and television channels also showed interest to lend their support. Google claims that more than 4500 developers are following and participating in discussions on the Project AMP on GitHub.

Project AMP aims to speed up the process of loading news articles, thus, enhancing the user experience. The content and text should be loaded in few seconds.

Facebook initially introduced Instant Articles for Android users. Last month, the social networking giant also rolled out the service for all iOS users. Every day, major publications including The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed, NBC News, The Atlantic, National Geographic, Cosmopolitan and many more post thousands of Instant Articles.

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