• by Tobi Elkin  @tobielkin, March 28, 2016

Rubicon Project on Monday announced that its FastLane header-bidding solution is now compliant with Google’s Accelerated Mobile Pages project, otherwise known as Google AMP. Rubicon said FastLane is the first header-bidding solution to be accepted by Google for the AMP project, which aims to offer consumers a faster, more streamlined mobile Web experience through an open-source framework.

Google AMP, which rolled out in February, can give mobile Web sites a way to compete with the seamless and quick response times of mobile apps. A search triggers the query and returns AMP-optimized content first in the results page in Chrome browsers,

“The goal behind Google AMP is to reduce the complexity of code on the Web pages,” said Neal Richter, Rubicon’s chief technology officer. “We noticed that we were starting to run up against some of the limits of browser performance.” For example, typically browsers will open six connections per server and often, there are two to 10 or more hits per domain. This means the browser needs to do a lot of more work, which delays page load times.

Latency and bloated Web pages are major concerns for publishers, as they impact consumers’ experience, particularly on mobile.

Rubicon, Dr. Richter said, is working with AMP upfront to reduce the amount of technology on a Web page. In FastLane, he said Rubicon is using publishers’ primary ad servers to influence the decisionmaking process within an AMP-compliant page so that publishers can take full advantage of the header-bidding product. “The goal is to expose every single Web page and every ad unit on the Web to the programmatic environment, rather than assuming that programmatic comes after the waterfall,” he added.

Google is focused on the same thing Rubicon is: speeding up the experience of consuming content, said Pieter de Zwart, vice president, engineering, Rubicon. “AMP is an actively evolving project. We’ve seen an evolution in the last few months as we’ve worked through this with Google,” de Zwart said.