Google Wants To Make Mobile Traffic Faster, Launches New Project

Tech behemoth Google wants to make mobile traffic a hell of a lot quicker, particularly for publishers.

Many mobile sites can be on the slow side of loading due to big ads, rich media or various bits of content, causing the consumer to tap their foot impatiently before harrumphing off to another speedier site.

It means advertisers on those snail-like websites and the publishers behind them lose out, leaving grumpy faces all round.

To combat this, Google has announced it’s launching a new project called Accelerated Mobile Pages, “for a faster, open mobile web”.

The premise, detailed on Google’s blog by David Besbris, vice president of engineering, search, at Google, explained how publishers around the world have their head in their hands at the loss of moolah and consumer happiness.

“Smartphones and tablets have revolutionised the way we access information,” wrote Besbris. “But the mobile web can still be pretty frustrating: sometimes it feels like the supercomputer in your hand takes longer to open a webpage than your PC did in 2004.

“Newspaper and magazine publishers around the world have told us it’s a serious pain point for them too. Every time a webpage takes too long to load, they lose a reader—and the opportunity to earn revenue through advertising or subscriptions.

“That’s because advertisers on these websites have a hard time getting consumers to pay attention to their ads when the pages load so slowly that people abandon them entirely.”

Enter Accelerated Mobile Pages.

The new project came after discussions with partners of Google’s Digital News Initiative, launched back in April.

The aim of Accelerated Mobile Pages is to “dramatically improve the performance of the mobile web”.

“We want webpages with rich content like video, animations and graphics to work alongside smart ads and to load instantaneously,” said Besbris. “We also want the same code to work across multiple platforms and devices so that content can appear everywhere in an instant — no matter what type of phone, tablet or mobile device you are using.”

Many publishers have already scrambled on board, with Fairfax and ninemsn leading the charge in Australia.

For more detail, check out Google’s blog here.

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