Dr Jarred McGinnis, UK managing consultant at Ontotext, discusses why Accelerated Mobile Pages is a good development, but not nearly enough if publishers wish to maximise their potential.
Slow page loading times. It’s a perennial annoyance for today’s online content consumer. It’s pretty clear that the pace of change today far outstrips what publishers could have imagined a few years ago – smartphones are now so popular that what was previously considered a niche concern is now key to publishers’ success. Optimising web pages for mobile performance appears to be something that is finally being taken seriously, a development that I wholeheartedly welcome and hope continues into 2016.
Consumers struggling with slow loading pages and clunky navigation creates a lose-lose situation for the consumer and publisher. That’s why Google leading a consortium of publishers on its Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) initiative is a great step forward. The collaboration between Google and web publishers demonstrates the cohesive and cooperative thinking sorely needed to provide the best possible mobile web experience.
However, this is only part of the story: increasing the speed at which pages load is a great step, but it’s not the only step needed to make browsing content online a more pleasant and useful experience in the years ahead. With content being created at an exponential rate, publishers must arm themselves with tools that will bring context to their content, enabling them to serve not just fast content, but the right content to their consumers.
Is your content right for your users?
The real question is how do publishers go about serving the right content to their customers?
By using semantic technologies which leverage text analysis, publishers are able turn their content into “smart content” and allow their computer systems to “understand” what any given article is about in a more nuanced and relevant way. Companies such as the BBC and The New York Times are bringing context to their data with their Manifesto for Structured Journalism and Innovation Report respectively, enriching their online user experience: their websites understand enough about the content to be able to present the most interesting content to the reader at the right time.
This family of technologies enables publishers’ computer systems to “know” that content about “David Cameron” is also relevant to “Prime Minister of the UK,” and that a “Strictly Come Dancing” story has a connection with “dancing,” “reality TV” or “Claudia Winkleman.” The technology builds a ‘graph’ (think of the tube map or a rail network) of what topics a particular user is interested in, in much more sophisticated ways than previously available. Paired with knowledge of the location and platform of the user, this further ensures that the user is getting a great experience and is being served the content they need.
Blocking the blockers
However, there’s no use developing ever-increasingly sophisticated set of content suggestions if your readers find your site an annoying place to be in the first place. You want great content on your site for more reasons than journalistic integrity: you want your users to click on ads.
Publishers must realise that maintaining a quality site doesn’t stop at the content, it must extend to the ads as well. Today’s online readers are increasingly opting out of inappropriate, irrelevant ads which form distractions from their online experience rather than enhancing it. There are dozens of browser extensions available for blocking adverts, and Apple recently included native ad-blocking capabilities for its iPhones and iPads. The rise of ad-blocking demonstrates that publishers are getting advertising wrong, are failing to match up the right ads with the right content, and both user experience and financials are suffering as a result.
The proliferation of these blockers has serious implications for the economics of the internet, however we may be able to make progress on this issue by examining why readers would use ad-blockers in the first place. One issue which Accelerated Mobile Pages is designed to solve is speed: ads slow down web pages with their flashy graphics, ad blockers prevent them from loading in the first place. With AMP these same pages will load much faster, but the problem still remains: readers don’t want ads.
Today’s online readers don’t like ads because they are on the whole annoying and not relevant to them. It’s here that we can bring in semantics again. By implementing semantic tools within the content delivery pipeline, publishers can relay essential information to ad buyers about their readers’ interests. As we’ve already seen, semantic metadata dramatically enhances computer systems’ ability to “understand” the context behind what the reader is viewing; Publishers are able to monetise that data relatively easily by showing users the most appropriate ads, bringing profit to publishers and an improved user experience to readers.
Bringing readers speed and relevance
Publishers have no control of what format their content is viewed in: today’s readers are fickle and will only become more so. If a specific page is loading slowly or has annoying ads, readers have a vast choice for getting similar information. This point is borne out by KISSmetrics, which found that 40% of people abandon a page which takes longer than three seconds to load on a mobile device.
If the past decade has anything to teach us, it’s that we cannot trust formats to be stable. New formats and platforms will continue to evolve, and publishers will be doomed to playing catch up unless they address the fundamental issues they’re facing. If publishers can learn to separate the content from the format that content is displayed in, they will be on their way to creating a flexible business model that stands a chance in these turbulent times.
So AMP is on to something, then. By intelligently matching content, and using the data generated by user behaviour to sell better, more targeted ads, publishers can finally begin securing a quality mobile experience for users. Users are becoming less and less loyal to publishing brands: to be successful in the future publishers can’t wait for the users to come to them, they must serve content to the audience as quickly as possible while they’re still engaged.
Dr Jarred McGinnis
UK managing consultant
Ontotext
www.ontotext.com