This is a problem that Google created. If they would prioritize small, simple, fast sites, and rank them higher, people would make more sites like that. Google is the one pushing slow, bloated sites to the top of the list. Now they are coming in to "fix" the problem that they made.
Good examples, but none of that is anything that I want. I'd much prefer small, simple, static pages to any of that. Additionally, they will load faster, and be easier to read. Those things are just trimming pages down to what Google wants, not users.
And as a user: IDGAF what publishers want. Sorry, they had their chance and blew it. And this is the problem: Publishers increasingly are ignoring what their users want. Instead of providing quality products, they keep circling the drain to get the lowest-quality content. GLWT
The page is still yours. You have absolute control over the branding, the analytics, the monetisation. Just because it happens not to be served from your domain doesn't mean it's not yours.
Let's also not forget that AMP is actively encouraging alternative caches: Cloudflare Ampersand[1] was announced literally an hour after my post. It's a whitelabelled AMP cache aimed at solving this exact problem.
Yes you still control most of it. My argument is that the traffic /would/ be going to your actual site (where you aren't limited at all) but now it is going to a google AMP page with strict limitations. Which isn't great, but the big deal is that bar on top that doesn't link to your site. That is so bad for your site and massively increases the bounce rate.
That is a sticking point for me. Alternative AMP caches (with alternative UX, e.g. Ampersand generally keeps users on your site when they bounce) go some way towards solving this, but they're not (yet?) first-class ecosystem citizens:
> But these are just guidelines, and Google can’t guarantee they’re behaving well, so they’re not first-class citizens.
> I’d love for this to be something you could statically verify, just like AMP HTML, so that anybody could add a Cache to the ecosystem and get a lightning bolt on Google search results and Cloudflare links and Twitter Moments™, but I’m pretty sure this reduces to the Halting Problem.
AMP is a PROXY/MITM service, with all the perks that come from being such a service. There is nothing stopping google ,or whatever company owns them after they become a Yahoo!, from changing their "policy" to better be aligned with their interests.
