Google’s Acquisition of Relay Media Will Boost its AMP Project

Google’s AMP Project (Accelerated Mobile Pages Project) should get a boost with the tech giant’s recent acquisition of Relay Media, a company that has created the AMP Converter technology that helps in making web pages AMP friendly. It is possible that under the acquisition deal, Relay Media will be closed down, with its technology transitioned to Google’s platform. 

In announcing the news, Relay Media also took the opportunity to reassure its existing customers that service will remain unchanged even as it gradually integrates AMP Converter to Google’s infrastructure, with new publisher onboarding halted at the moment. The company warned though that if the AMP Converter goes through any changes during the transition period, customers will get a three month notice in advance so that they can make preparations accordingly.

The last couple of years have seen Google’s AMP Project grow healthily. And its acquisition of Relay Media should not be that surprising. Relay Media, after all, was founded by somebody who used to work for Google -- David Gehring. Apart from previously working for the search giant, Gehring has also worked for The Guardian.

AMP’s reach has also expanded -- the project began as a means for making web pages, initially online publications, more easily downloadable on mobile devices. But AMP has now grown to also tackle e-commerce pages. Back in May earlier this year, Google had revealed that AMP has already covered over 2 billion mobile pages across 900,000 web domains.

While AMP has done so much already in making web pages load faster on mobile devices, the journey has not been a complete bed of roses. Sure, web publishers are happy with the fact that their web pages can now reach wider audiences (because the web pages load faster, people are more likely to to read the content), but they do not always have complete control with regards to how the web pages are presented or monetized. 

In related news, it was recently reported that Google has renamed the “AMP” label found on search results to “Instant.” And instead of the previous gray colored font, the new Instant stamp is now rendered in a more visible blue color. Just to be clear about everything, Google has not confirmed the change officially, which means that it is quite possible that the Instant label is just being tested by the tech giant. The presumption is that if all goes well, Google will go ahead and roll out the new name across all Google search platforms, or maybe, continue exploring even catchier names than the original AMP label.