How is Google AMP similar to Facebook Instant Articles and Apple News?

Recently, both Apple and Facebook launched similar applications to Google AMP that improve load speed for news articles. Instant Articles is a mobile application that allows publishers to distribute their articles directly to Facebook’s app, which then displays the articles up to ten times faster for the viewer. Instead of a viewer only seeing the image, title and a short description of the article on the Newsfeed,  they will see the entire article right there. Facebook is essentially acting as a news gatherer. This has the ability to improve brand awareness, click-throughs and readability. While it is a great function created by Facebook, publishers are facing some of the same issues – functionality and formatting of these pages are rather limited. Slideshows, videos and other elements can not be added. The other issue is that advertising capabilities are limited. We see a lot of the same pros and cons here that we do with Google AMP.

Apple News is also a sleek news aggregator, collecting interesting content from different sources all in one place. Like all other Apple products, Apple News is praised for its design. This is not an open-source platform – making it only useful for viewing. As you can see, both Facebook and Apple are challenging Google’s business model, making it more and more necessary for Google to get on board, and subsequently, Google users. As of now, these are the three players that publishers need to be aware of.