The Action Network Is First US Publisher to Go ‘All-In’ on AMP

Here at The Action Network, we believe being first has its advantages.

As one of the first publishers solely focused on covering the legalized U.S. sports betting market, we know how important it is to deliver news and information that matters most, as fast as possible.

We've got 30-plus credible and established journalists creating 40-50 original news articles every day, supported by data scientists, analysts and highly-respected personalities from the sports world.

When lines open, we’re first. When there’s favorable line movement, we alert you via our app. And when there’s a last-minute injury to a key player on Sunday, we immediately adjust our fantasy rankings.

Today, we're happy to announce that we’ve gotten even faster thanks to another landmark first: The Action Network is the first U.S. publisher to go fully live with AMP as canonical, serving lightning fast news articles on both mobile and desktop browsers.

We love diving into the numbers at The Action Network, so here are a few key stats that show how we’ve improved since we’ve gone live with AMP (accelerated mobile pages):

First View: With AMP, time to first paint was reduced by 66%
Before AMP: 9.33 seconds
With AMP: 3.16 seconds

Load time improvement: With AMP, time to fully load was reduced by 64%
Before AMP: 8973 ms
With AMP: 3196 ms

There are also many technical benefits of going AMP as canonical:

• We simplified our code base by focusing exclusively on AMP and its performance
• Lazy loading render blocking resources drastically improve our mobile performance
• AMP's robust library of components gives us the flexibility to do what we need to do aesthetically and functionally
• AMP keeps our CSS slim and efficient — no more bloated frameworks!
• Going 100% AMP allows us to support one codebase for content across all platforms

We would not have been able to reach AMP’s full potential without the easy-to-use tools of Google’s AMP By Example, AMP Project and the warning & error reporting in the new Google Search Console.

Each news publisher should weigh the pros and cons of going AMP as canonical on their business.

For us, the value of speed and a singular codebase outweighs any known issues, such as some hiccups with reporting pertaining to user session across AMP cache and publisher origin (which are currently being addressed by Google and Segment).