What does this all mean?
First, it means that Dieter and I drink a lot of bourbon and talk about the sad, slow death of the open web a lot. (It was a good run, open web! So sorry that Apple killed you by turning Safari into the new IE and forbidding alternative browsers to innovate on iOS.)
Second, it means that mobile web article pages are quickly becoming the least important thing we make, even though they’re currently a huge part of what most people think of as The Verge. Let’s plot it out:
There are three main paths most readers use to get to a Verge story: the homepage, search, and social, and all of those are increasingly mobile.
Our search traffic largely comes from Google, which already serves our AMP pages in Google News. Google is also switching mobile search results to AMP links, and that means almost all of our search visitors will see AMP pages instead of the mobile web.
Our social traffic mix is dominated by Facebook, where we already serve every article in Facebook Instant Articles — and features and reviews are coming soon. That means a huge percentage of our social traffic is already seeing Instant Articles instead of the mobile web, and that number will just go up as we deliver more story types in IA.
Twitter is basically the rest of the social mix, and Twitter is signed up to use… AMP. Twitter already loads AMP pages in Moments, and it’s only a matter of time before clicking a link from the main timeline loads an AMP page by default. (In fact, I don’t know why Twitter doesn’t already do this. Get on it, Jack.)
Other social platforms like Pinterest are also signed up to use AMP, because Facebook isn’t sharing Instant Articles, and none of them can force publishers to dance the way Facebook and Google can.
We still have a very popular homepage that sends people to standard mobile article pages, as do emailed links and so on, but our homepage traffic is obviously tiny compared to search and social.