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Comment by mark242 | Hacker News Reader

Okay but let's be realistic-- you are not a major publisher trying to make money off these pages. You can say "yes my page loads in 100k and 300ms until DOMContentLoaded" all you want, that doesn't change the fact that when you slap a couple of pieces of advertising on there, it's going to slow down.

To give you an idea-- the New York Times page without any advertising on it is 2MB and has a DOMContentLoaded event at 1.29s, approximately 1 second slower than your page. With advertising, it is 3.9MB and 1.82s.

When ad networks are able to run without almost 2MB of Javascript, then we can talk about how AMP isn't needed.

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> you are not a major publisher trying to make money off these pages.

Hate to break it to you, but major publishers aren't making any money of the AMP'd version of their pages - most of the monetization is stripped out, and readers aren't even actually on their site so they won't stay and click around.

The spec for amp specifically has an "amp-ad" tag for displaying ads. There are multiple ways they can be shown in an AMP page. The nice thing about AMP ads is they will not cause the page to change layout/flow as they load. I believe a size must be declared for ads to prevent bad behavior.

https://www.ampproject.org/docs/reference/components/amp-ad

I didn't say they couldn't show ads, but basic ads aren't the only way that these places monetize. Trackers, 'you might also like' panels, etc all feed in to the overall monetization strategy. A couple of amp-approved ads on an amp-page don't necessarily make up for all that...

You very clearly said "aren't making any money of the AMP'd version of their pages" and that's not true.

They can put ads, they can even put analytics and links back to their main site. The brand lift they get from all the views also has value.

I'm pretty sure 'all that' is what users are trying to avoid with AMP.

I'm not trying to avoid anything. As a user I don't even get a choice for AMP or no AMP. In fact, I changed my search engine on my phone to DuckDuckGo specifically to get rid of AMP pages.

Trackers work in amp too.

If you're loading ads in AMP, there's nothing stopping you from loading equivalent ads in your POHTML either.

Unless Google won't let you load lightweight ads outside of AMP, which is its own issue.

As a dev at a major publisher I can confirm that we are making money off these pages, and readers are actually clicking on more recirculation links. The monetization isn't stripped out at all, it's just all sandboxed in iframes.

They have AMP-approved ads that can be loaded.

^^^And THAT RIGHT THERE is why I load the asynchronous Adsense script at the very bottom of my pages, after everything else, and why I load my core JavaScript synchronously, just before that, so it can schedule key tasks before getting swamped with third party guff.

I mean, sure, Adsense loads asynchronously and Google claims it won't slow your page loads, but once it starts loading advertising assets and scripts it's the Wild West. Some - not all, by any means, but some - of those third party scripts are extremely badly behaved and, yes, they do measurably slow your page load down.

    page without any advertising on it is 2MB and has a 
    DOMContentLoaded event at 1.29s

    With advertising, it is 3.9MB and 1.82s

This does not support your core argument about ads being the issue.

The ads load in 602ms.

The page loads in 1290ms

The ads are 1.9MB of data

The page is 2MB

Yes the ads are very heavy. But how are the ads slowing the page down exactly? The page is already INCREDIBLY slow without them.

Only ~30% of load time is spent with displaying the ads. The other ~60% is what ever brain damage the NYT web team cooked up. If anything you are enforcing parent poster's point.

I doubt the payload is the problem in most cases. The ads load asynchronously, in most cases, and cause other types of performance issues. When an ad loads and causes your scroll position to be lost, or when the ad takes over the screen and can't be closed, or when you get a malicious ad that starts running JavaScript that starts opening alerts and redirects you, all of these things simply don't happen with AMP.

+1. What's more, you can choose advertisers according to the size of their ads. And if you are big enough, you can ask them to modify them.

>> When ad networks are able to run without almost 2MB of Javascript, then we can talk about how AMP isn't needed

AMP pages run ads....

But doesn't AMP force ads to be async?

Majority of the ads nowadays are async, just bloated and record your every move and slow down the experience.

Okay, but let's be realistic—this absolutely ruins any online experience. AMP just ads another layer of suck over an already sucky experience.

I disagree with that. AMP pages load and work for me without fail. Most non-AMP news sites are unreadable on my phone. Saying it adds a "layer of suck over an already sucky experience" doesn't give AMP nearly enough credit.

How do you find the URL of an AMP page? What's the point of it if I can't? Sharing content from mobile is near impossible without also tracking the sharing.

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