Depending on which side of this business model you fall on, you will be either really happy – or really not – that AMP is supporting both paywalls and subscriptions.

“AMP’s paywall implementation is crucial for publishers of quality contents. Google’s AMP team has come up with a system able to address most of the configurations, from metered paywall to freemium models. From the parameters of the conversion mechanism to the rendering of a page served to a subscriber, the whole system can be fine-tuned in multiple ways. This should vastly improve the potential for  monetization as roughly half of the audiences have now shifted to mobile.”

It will also support the model of X pages free per month as well as subscription only.

The AMP Runtime puts together the publisher instructions with the document markup to show the user exactly what the publisher intended. For instance, this could mean showing full content to a subscriber, a metering message to an anonymous user, or a snippet followed by a subscription upsell message to a user who has exhausted their metered quota.

I imagine it was an issue that was holding some sites from jumping on board AMP, since it wasn’t clear if, or how, AMP would support either paywalls or subscriptions.  So it isn’t surprising AMP is supporting it to encourage even more publishers, particularly news sites, to get on board with AMP.

The AMP Project has documentation and examples for publishers wanting to learn more about the support of AMP paywalls.

Google has been pushing AMP very hard and many publishers, especially news sites, have been getting AMP pages ready for the rollout which is scheduled to happen by the end of the month.  Google also added new AMP error reporting in Google Search Console in preparation for it going live.

If you are wanting to learn more about AMP and paywalls, they are planning to host an AMP hangout specifically on AMP Paywalls on February 12th at 9am PST.