Google takes on Facebook and Apple with faster web-based news

•  Comments

Google has launched another offensive in its battle to keep news sites on the open web rather than locked in mobile apps controlled by its rivals Facebook and Apple.

The company announced on Wednesday that it was working with more than 30 news publishers, including The Guardian, the BBC and the Financial Times, as well as several technology groups such as Twitter and LinkedIn, on an initiative called Accelerated Mobile Pages. Google plans to implement the technology early next year.

News distribution is becoming one of the fiercest battlegrounds among Silicon Valley’s biggest technology groups.

In May Facebook launched “instant articles”, which allows news publishers to post stories directly into its mobile app rather than having to link back to their own websites. The offering lured publishers including The New York Times and BuzzFeed by arguing that the resultant speed would be highly attractive to readers. Last month, the Washington Post became the first news organisation to allow all of its articles to be published on the platform, saying it was able to give “readers a lightning-fast user experience”.

Last month, Apple launched its News service, which also loads articles immediately within an app.

“Every time a web page takes too long to load, they lose a reader — and the opportunity to earn revenue through advertising or subscriptions,” Mr Besbris said.

Google’s initiative is designed to bring the speed of native mobile apps to the open web. The project is also open source, meaning that any publisher or technology company can use it for free.

“This is a really important moment for us to help make the web great again,” Mr Besbris said.

The future of news: Stop the presses!

The internet era has not been kind to newspaper publishers. But after more than a decade of struggling to keep up, a glimmer of hope has brightened the pervading gloom in the industry.

Smartphones and tablets have been replacing desktop computers as the primary way that people access the internet, with users increasingly using apps that do not rely on the web. This shift has been a problem for Google because so much of its advertising revenue is based on web pages.

But many publishers are wary of handing over their content to Facebook and Apple’s so-called “walled gardens”, whereby users are steered to those companies’ own services.

Tony Danker, chief strategy officer at Guardian News & Media, publisher of The Guardian, said that accelerated mobile pages was “a project of real ambition. It seeks simultaneously to create a great user experience, to give more autonomy to publishers to deliver that and to develop effective advertising for the mobile web.”

The Google-led initiative involves creating common standards for the technical underpinnings of mobile web pages.

The code underlying the plan has been posted to GitHub, an online forum for software developers.

Many technical specifications are yet to be worked out, including how the initiative will deal with advertising and subscriptions.
source