Google will kick off the new year with their Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) Project to bring speed and an overall better mobile experience when it comes to viewing news articles. Why wait 3 seconds for an article to load when you can wait 500 milliseconds? The question we have to ask ourselves: what does this mean for mobile advertising?

So what’s AMP? Here’s the scoop. AMP is Google’s latest initiative, a new coding language if you will, that streamlines the way most webpages are displayed by reducing redundancy in the programming that goes into building every page. It also allows for smart caching which allows for faster loading. So to the end viewer, they can load news articles faster on their mobile devices. When you’re on the go, milliseconds matter.

AMP was created as a direct response to Facebook’s latest “Instant Articles”, that will allow articles to load faster outside of the social platform right from Google Search. With mobile advertising being a huge revenue driver for Google, it needs to incentivize users to view articles outside of Facebook or it risks losing prime advertising dollars.

When it comes to advertising, the hope is that it will be an overall better experience as well. The new coding will reduce slow-loading pages that get bogged down with hefty advertising files. However, there is a concern that many of the advertising formats previously used would no longer work. Google states, “it wants to develop ways to incorporate other kinds of analytics and advertising, by coming up with a centralized library of code that can integrate with any analysis or advertising network’s back-end. But that will take time.” This could mean loss in advertising revenue for Google but also restrictions on advertising for companies until they figure that piece out.

There’s lots of support from online giants such as Buzzfeed, Washington Post, New York Times, CBS Interactive, AOL and more who are using the open source to build their pages to Google’s spec to provide a better viewing experience. Ad networks such as Outbrain, OpenX, DoubleClick and AdSense are also working on integrating advertising. And we can’t forget about analytics partners Nielsen, comScore, ClickTale and Adobe Analytics. The gang is all here and they’re ready to serve up content AMP style early next year.

The performance gains are real and impact substantial, but with Facebook’s “Instant Articles”, Apple News, and other news apps out there, will Google take the lead with mobile article serving? Fortune thinks publishers should take a step back when it comes to embracing AMP because it’s so new and could impact their bottom line. On the other hand, Google has a pretty good track record so it might be in their best interest to experiment with it.

 

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