Accelerated Mobile Page (AMP) is Google's way of delivering websites in a faster and more convenient manner.
When it was introduced in October 2015, AMP wasn't embraced by all publishers. But after the company worked to address various concerns and issues from publishers, many have been pleased with the way Google had handled AMP.
This further developed AMP Stories.
To make this happen, Google has been working with CNN, Meredith, Mashable, Mic, Vox and Condé Nast to initiate the roll out of AMP Stories.
AMP Stories are unlike Snapchat and Instagram Stories, which are features within their own respective platforms. AMP Stories shared Google's AMP, which means that they can be found in Google's search engine results page (SERP) on mobile.
The feature provides users with a engaging slideshow experience with rich media features such as video, audio, pictures and text in a format that mobile users have been known to like.
Related: Explaining The Three Phases For Google AMP To Speed Up The Web
At its launch, the AMP Stories have components that are still in “experimental” and development mode. Publishers need to enable it for users within the AMP Dev Channel in order to get started.
The advantages of AMP Stories if compared to Instagram and Snapchat’s product:
- Works with Google search.
- Platform-independent.
- Scriptable for full or semi-automated story creation.
On mobile devices, people tend to browse lots of articles, but engage with few in-depth.
"Images, videos and graphics help publishers to get their readers' attention as quickly as possible and keep them engaged through immersive and easily consumable visual information," said Google on its blog post.
"Just like any web page, a publisher hosts an AMP story HTML page on their site and can link to it from any other part of their site to drive discovery."
The basic concept behind constructing the first AMP Story, is to start putting the < amp-story >, < amp-story-page > and < amp-story-grid >. They have only one < amp-story > tag on a given hypertext markup language (HTML) page.