NewsBeat

12 NewsBeat December 2015 Why Google and gang don't like your web site oogle, Facebook, and Apple are not happy with your mobile Web site. It's too slow. It doesn't look very good. And it's costing them — and you — users and money. They are betting their ecosystems offer a better fix than our own. And they don't want to wait for the media and advertising industries to correct things themselves. Facebook is making moves to address mobile performance — though mostly in their favour — with Instant Articles. Instant Articles launched publicly in late October after a short trial with The Atlantic, The New York Times, and others. It "displays stories as much as 10 times faster than conventional mobile browsers, while also providing the kind of fluid, high- quality experience, and interactivity people expect," says Facebook. Also, Facebook can sell ads into them (at a 30% cut) if the publisher agrees. Importantly, this content lives only in Facebook. Instant articles do provide a superior experience for Facebook app users — and for Facebook. It's less clear how much the publishers will benefit, even with a 70% share of ad revenue. By CHUCK BLEVINS G Project — a framework to optimise Web pages for speed through simpler HTML, lessened reliance on JavaScript, and use of open-source libraries. It's a work in progress, but the search giant is soliciting industry feedback and participation with its development. Google has been making waves by banging the Web performance drum for some time. As with Facebook, the efforts are about improving the environment for Google's own core businesses, as much of its other efforts have been — like Google Fiber and the mobile friendly algorithm. "Mobilegeddon" this past spring sent publisher scrambling to align with the release of Google's mobile-friendly algorithm, which uses more than 200 factors to determine if a site is mobile-friendly and impacts placement on search results. Targeted as a factor are prestitials that cover sites Web pages with notices to download the native app (but not general advertisements). Any site displaying one is not mobile-friendly. Facebook, Google, and Apple spin their moves as being about good user experience and As Matthew Ingram notes in Fortune, " … Facebook doesn't really care about the revenue from ads around news content (although I expect most partners will take the 70% deal, if not now then later, because Facebook is better at selling ads). What Facebook wants is to deepen and strengthen its hold on users." Google obviously doesn't benefit if Facebook or Apple pull news content inside their walls, so pushing changes on the free Web is sensible. That response is Google's open-source Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP)

• Cover