OCTOBER 7, 2016
Relay Media helps publishers get AMP’d
Relay Media was founded in 2015 with the purpose of converting web content to AMP for publishers. The company has placed a big bet on AMP’s long-term importance to the online ecosystem, and is committed to strengthening the format’s foothold on the mobile web. “Today’s lumbering and overloaded mobile web pages are the legacy of a volume-based advertising marketplace that’s being replaced by one tuned to viewability and engagement” said Barb Palser, Chief Product Officer at Relay Media.
Solution
“We’re championing AMP because it’s aligned with consumer and market forces pushing the digital content economy toward performance, measurability and quality user experience. The company has converted content for a number of companies including The Miami Herald, The Daily Dot, and Hearst Television. Relay Media acknowledges that implementing basic AMP HTML is fairly easy, but they strive to do more than that. “AMP needs to be more than fast; it needs to advance a publisher’s digital strategy. It needs to drive engagement and business value by supporting a publisher’s range of content formats, embeds, style and branding elements, navigation, analytics, ads, paywall services and other revenue products,” said Palser. AMP already enables this functionality, and Relay Media helps publishers take full advantage of the format. The company has generated more than 2.5 million AMP pages for publishers in the last 30 days.
Results
Many of Relay Media’s clients are seeing positive AMP results. The most profound benefit for clients in converting to AMP is the decrease in page load time. Relay Media’s AMP articles load in under 700 milliseconds, compared to 8-12 seconds or more for their standard mobile counterparts.
Derrick Ho, Senior Mobile Manager for McClatchy, which owns the Miami Herald, reported that “mobile search users who read the Miami Herald starting with an AMP article spend 10% more time than those who land on regular mobile pages.” Arsenio Santos, Chief Product Officer at the Daily Dot, worked with Relay Media to create AMP pages for the news site covering internet culture and life on the web. Santos reported that 90% of visitors on their AMP pages are new readers. The team is satisfied with the results, “AMP provides users with a reliable, immediate browsing experience. We strongly recommend it,” said Santos.
As more users shift to mobile, said Palser, “Publishers can and must differentiate themselves by delivering a fast, rewarding user experience which in turn provides a clean environment for advertisers. Everything about AMP supports these principles; we think it’s a great place to start.”