OCTOBER 7, 2016
Slate gets efficient with AMP
Slate.com, the current affairs magazine covering news, politics, technology, and culture, began publishing AMP at the beginning of this year. Slate consistently strives to create a great overall user experience and the decision to implement AMP was a straightforward one.
Solution
“We saw AMP as a way to improve how mobile users experience Slate”
“We saw AMP as a way to improve how mobile users experience Slate, since the initial implementations by other publishers showed how fast the experience actually was. It was also encouraging that Google was collaborating with multiple publishers to build AMP -- that signaled an investment by the publishing community to ensure the success of the format,” said Chris Schieffer, Senior Product Manager at Slate.com. The online magazine created AMP pages for 60% of its content and is ramping up to 100% later this month.
Results
The Slate team has been impressed by traffic and engagement metrics on AMP pages since implementation. They have seen a 44% increase in monthly unique visitors from Google searches and a 73% increase in visits per monthly unique user.
Slate runs a lean team and immediately recognized the efficiency that AMP brought to its tech stack. The team decided to utilize AMP in more of its products and is currently working with their AMP pages to build their new Android app.
“AMP provided us with a way to rebuild our Android app without contracting work.”
“AMP provided us with a way to rebuild our Android app without contracting work. Not only is it fast but it provides solid monetization opportunities. As a relatively small team, we have to be smart about where we invest technically, and we knew that we could get good value and efficiency by reusing our AMP work by further integrating it into our products,” said Schieffer. Slate estimates that they have saved $85k/year in development resources by reusing AMP docs for the Android app.
Looking to the future, Slate is excited to further monetize AMP content by experimenting with AMP for Ads. They would also like to offer the AMP experience through SlateCustom, the publisher’s in-house agency that creates branded content experiences. Schieffer said that “AMP feels like a natural extension of those multi-platform campaigns.” Overall, the team stands behind the decision to implement; “AMP felt and still feels to be in line with our goals as a brand: innovative, smart, and user-first,” said Schieffer.