Here's the reality. The Taboola news carousals at the bottom of most slow loading actual news sites are filled with total junk. One page per image websites, super slow, adblock goes crazy. I've literally NEVER had a good experience with these "Stories you may like" Google does something with a news carousel that loads fast and the content isn't crap. I get why publishers running things like taboola think it's terribl…
AMP is a fork of HTML that pressures limited developer resources to maintain a version for Google's visitors while only being fast because of arbitrary framework limitations. You can get a far better outcome by having search results consider site speed as a factor in rankings, which would make all publishers improve their sites overnight. The reason Google doesn't do this is because they also run the biggest ad netwo…
Google AMP case study: leads dropped by 59%
121–130 of 163 posts
Re: Google AMP case study: leads dropped by 59%
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Google AMP on iOS is also much worse than Safari + adBlocker. AMP also leaves out relevant content.
A huge pet peeve of mine was that I'd google for something I once saw on Reddit, or maybe I just wanted to see a certain discussion. Google would identify the correct post, but then I'd either get it in AMP or new-redesign format, both of which present a terrible loss in readability (for the most part). With AMP in particular, there was no obvious link back towards Reddit itself. And with the redesign, the actual dis…
Heh I uninstalled reddit is fun a while ago to limit my procrastination. Worked well. But I reinstalled after about a week because I search for things on Reddit via Google regularly.
Reddit has some disturbing dark patterns going on.
You can't view a page on their site without being nudged to use their app. And you're asked every single page view. Like take a damn hint please.
I'd be ok with the asking but they use different popups with the "no, go away" answer in different places with different wording.
This is all exasperated by AMP, I have to click the amp banner twice to load the real url, this then prompts to open in reddit is fun. Prompts because I want this to happen only sometimes.
Re: Google AMP case study: leads dropped by 59%
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
So you prefer when pages take >10s to load, have interstitial ads covering the content, and have ads that load in while you scroll, causing the content to jump around on you? I'm pretty happy with amp as an alternative to newspapers' awful websites.
Reader view in firefox makes it very fast. Like how the web used to be. It just displays the images/text of the actual content and strips everything else out. I immediately hit that button on most sites now, and they load in under 1s (usually way under). It even has a dark mode! No videos playing, no ads changing in sidebars distracting your eyes, no popups making your click through. Just the content you wanted to se…
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Re: Google AMP case study: leads dropped by 59%
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
AMP pages mean Google has 1st party access to your browser no matter what you browse, which is far more than normal. I didn't state any preferences, and how would sites track you on pages you don't visit?
> how would sites track you on pages you don't visit? As I stated in GGGP, the benefit of AMP is that it allows a user to safely preload pages.
Because you never leave Google's domain, thereby allowing it track you far more. Preloading is a minor detail considering how much privacy is removed.
Re: Google AMP case study: leads dropped by 59%
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why do you keep saying "you prefer" in comments? That's a poor way to frame arguments. What I actually prefer is HTML which is universally accessible by any device and service. No reason to have any proprietary formats like AMP or others.
> No reason to have any proprietary formats like AMP or others. Unless you want pages to load instantly, which is what AMP and its non-web competitors provide.
HackerNews loads instantly, as do many other sites. HTML works fine.
The problem is the stuff on the page, like ads delivered by Google AdX. Removing or optimizing those will make any page faster. No AMP necessary.
Slow sites are not a technical problem, they are a business and marketing problem.
Re: Google AMP case study: leads dropped by 59%
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
I’d prefer they stuck to HTML and CSS, with a bit of progressively enhanced JS on top if needed.
Which is fine but not a substitute to Facebook's or Apple's solutions. People want their articles to load instantly, not merely quickly, which means you need a subset of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript that can be validated to be safe to preload, which is exactly what AMP is.
Preloading is just making server calls which is already possible, and preloading the HTML of the page will give you most of the experience of an instant transition without any need to validate anything.
Re: Google AMP case study: leads dropped by 59%
#127It’s been about a decade since Google provided a decent user experience for search. We really need an alternative.
Re: Google AMP case study: leads dropped by 59%
#128I don’t like AMP, but I am so happy to see when websites complain that “leads dropped by 59%” because of it. For “leads” to drop that much it must mean they weren’t legitimate, happy leads in the first place. I bet those “leads” came from a shit letter popup or other similar dark pattern, in which case AMP works as designed and benefits the user by shielding them from such garbage. AMP is bad for the web in the long…
> But it is a decent stop-gap solution given that nobody is willing to make their websites bearable without Google’s pressure.
Somehow I don’t think Google wants them to stop showing ads. Everything else is a distraction that ignores the root cause of the customer experience being shitty.
Re: Google AMP case study: leads dropped by 59%
#129Earlier quoted context omitted.
> The Taboola news carousals at the bottom of most slow loading actual news sites are filled with total junk. This, a thousands times. For both Taboola and Outbrain it's clickbaity trash - usually misleading and low quality content. They're designed to "disrupt" so that people click on them and have in the past featured on blatantly false news stories. I'd honestly be ashamed to work at one of these sort of organisat…
dumb question: do Taboola and Outbrain try to infer the user's demographics based on the clickbait "news stories" the user clicks? e.g. some of these "stories" appeal specifically to fans of a particular TV show or actor from a specific time range.
No, and they have little reason to do so.
They throw spaghetti at the wall, cater to low quality publishers and use your location to clumsily make it seem like the content is relevant to you with the most clickbaity headlines known to man.
But the thing is ... it works. People are clicking on this nonsense and other people are paying for those clicks (and publishers making money in the process).
Re: Google AMP case study: leads dropped by 59%
#130Here's the reality. The Taboola news carousals at the bottom of most slow loading actual news sites are filled with total junk. One page per image websites, super slow, adblock goes crazy. I've literally NEVER had a good experience with these "Stories you may like" Google does something with a news carousel that loads fast and the content isn't crap. I get why publishers running things like taboola think it's terribl…
I assume you're free to implement taboola like widgets on an AMP page that link out to garbage.
Yeah, I don't get parent's argument "AMP is not that bad because Taboola". AMP is a technological solution and as such it doesn't prevent content creators from publishing crap.