David Pierce tells the story of Google’s AMP initiative:
After a decade of newspapers disappearing, magazine circulations shrinking, and websites’ business dwindling, the media industry had become resigned to its own powerlessness. Even the most cynical publishers had grown used to playing whatever games platforms like Google and Facebook demanded in a quest for traffic…
“If Google said, ‘you must have your homepage colored bright pink on Tuesdays to be the result in Google,’ everybody would do it, because that’s what they need to do to survive,” says Terence Eden, a web standards expert and a former member of the Google AMP Advisory Committee.
[…]
AMP succeeded spectacularly. Then it failed. And to anyone looking for a reason not to trust the biggest company on the internet, AMP’s story contains all the evidence you’ll ever need.
It seems important that this reporting is coming from The Verge, a publication that was dramatically redesigned last year to shift focus away from external platforms.
Introducing the redesign, editor-in-chief Nilay Patel wrote:
Our goal in redesigning The Verge was actually to redesign the relationship we have with you, our beloved audience. Six years ago, we developed a design system that was meant to confidently travel across platforms as the media unbundled itself into article pages individually distributed by social media and search algorithms.
[…]
But publishing across other people’s platforms can only take you so far. And the more we lived with that decision, the more we felt strongly that our own platform should be an antidote to algorithmic news feeds, an editorial product made by actual people with intent and expertise
As an aside, when Safari Web Extensions for mobile launched with iOS 15, various “AMP blocker” utilities immediately became hugely popular. I have had one installed ever since. If you don’t, do yourself a favor.