The Accelerated Mobile Pages of Alphabet Inc (NASDAQ:GOOGL) will now be available to over a billion people in the Asia Pacific region following the formation of partnerships between the Mountain View, California-based technology giant and internet companies in the region. These regional internet firms includes Sogou and Baidu Inc (ADR) (NASDAQ:BIDU) which together control about 90% of the Chinese online search market.
Google’s AMP which was unveiled in late 2015 is a system which allows websites and ads that are contained in the webpages to load faster across platforms and devices. Then, its launch was seen as a way to counter a similar system by Facebook Inc (NASDAQ:FB), Instant Articles, which was growing fast.
Inaugural Developer conference
The partnership between Google and the Asia internet firms was disclosed in New York City during the inaugural AMP developer conference. David Besbris, Google’s engineering vice president commented that the partnerships would ultimately be to the benefit of internet users since the reach of AMP pages would be extended with the partnerships. It would also assist publishers in that they would only need to create one file without having to configure to fit in the various devices and platforms.
“[AMP pages are] the same as the web. That’s not typically the case in the distribution platforms,” said Bebris.
Growing uptake of AMP
In the United States, the platforms and services that already offer support for AMP include Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) LinkedIn, Pinterest, eBay Inc (NASDAQ:EBAY), and Bing. Tumblr, which is owned by Yahoo! Inc. (NASDAQ:YHOO), is in plans to provide support for AMP. With regards to LinkedIn, Besbris noted that AMP articles on the platform were more engaging and readers spent 10% more time on them vi-a-vis non-AMP articles.
The vice president of engineering at Google also added that even though accelerated mobile pages were originally devised for news articles, the system has since then been extended to other online content and platforms including in areas such as e-commerce. Some of the earliest adopters of AMP were Buzzfeed and The New York Times.
In Wednesday’s trading session, shares of Alphabet Inc edged up by 0.29% to close the day at $853.64 a share.
