AMP Stories Elevates Mobile Storytelling to a Higher Level

A new story format is going to take mobile browsing to the next level and is now in the experimental stage. The (Accelerated Mobile Pages) AMP story format has been launched recently as an addition to the AMP Project. The AMP story format, whose early development was spearheaded by Google in collaboration with different publishers - CNN, Conde Nast, Hearst, Mashable, Meredith, Mic, Vox Media, and The Washington Post, allows publishers to deliver news and information on mobile via fresh, creative and visually rich tap-through format. The development team has made AMP Stories available for everyone to try on their website. Here’s the link to the tutorial and documentation.

AMP focuses on enhancing the mobile experience for users. From the marketing perspective, there is a lot of potential for increasing engagement, and ultimately, conversion because of its visual appeal that will help capture the audience’s attention. This is our first post on AMP Story format, and we want to start by describing AMP and how its feature will create a different experience.

AMP is visually-driven

It combines layers of videos, images and graphics to capture readers’ attention and give them an immersive experience. As a result, the content is easily consumed almost instantaneously in the form of visual information. As Elite Truong hits it in the AMP Conf 2018, on AMP format, publishers figure out what is “impactful and relevant, and tell them in the most visually striking way that informs readers.”

AMP lessens the technical challenge of producing optimal mobile content

AMP lays out the groundwork so that publishers can focus on the creative visual storytelling. Creating high-performing visual stories is the best way of sharing content on mobile but may require technical mastery and often involve high cost which can be prohibitive especially for startups. AMP stories are off-the rack built on the technical infrastructure of AMP. Publishers host an AMP page on their site and link it to various sections of their site and drive discovery. It comes with pre-renderable page functions, optimised video loading and caching for optimised delivery. It also comes with preset flexible templates, standardised UI controls and other components for sharing and adding content. The keywords are compact and easy without compromising creative editorial freedom.

AMP Stories are easily consumable

The use of visual image and video asset components allows for bite-sized content but yet effective enough to be immersive and easily consumed by readers.

AMP is flexible and encourages creativity

It supports a breadth of content, from news, lifestyle, sports to health and entertainment. It also works across all devices. Out of the box, AMP pages are created with layers stack up on top of one another and are composite of each other. This makes it easy to adapt to any design.

A story is composed of templates of AMP Pages that are largely configurable to allow creativity for making each page stand out.

At the end of the story, a template UI is automatically added which is called a system bookend that has a default template but is fully customisable. It is composed of two main sections. The first section is for sharing where you find share provider objects - each of these comes with AMP social share. Share providers that are supported by AMP social share are also supported by the AMP story bookend.

The second main sections are the “related articles” which you can customise. It is composed of objects for the article, subject and the URL that you can navigate. You can add as many sub-sections to categorise the articles. It can be configured static or dynamic if you want to automatically update it for Related links or trending links, etc. This type of configuration allows to reuse it for other stories easily.

These stories take virtual storytelling across platforms in the open web - websites, on social, news feeds, and other platforms - not limited to the third party platform where it is produced so you can easily reach more readers with less editorial effort.

What’s next with AMP?

On this phase, publishers should start figuring out how to adapt their stories into the AMP format, come up with the people with the right mix of skills to showcase their editorial products.

There is much more to come for AMP. As Jon Newmuis mentioned in the annual AMP Conf 2018, there are plans already laid out in the AMP roadmap, as follows:

drive monetization by supporting ads and improving support for affiliate linking
expand support more broadly outside of the English language
come up with richer features and more interactive storytelling devices to aid publishers in telling their stories the way they want them told
make amp stories seamlessly embeddable wherever they show up with the right metadata, beautiful previews and stellar performance