> you are not a major publisher trying to make money off these pages.
Hate to break it to you, but major publishers aren't making any money of the AMP'd version of their pages - most of the monetization is stripped out, and readers aren't even actually on their site so they won't stay and click around.
The spec for amp specifically has an "amp-ad" tag for displaying ads. There are multiple ways they can be shown in an AMP page. The nice thing about AMP ads is they will not cause the page to change layout/flow as they load. I believe a size must be declared for ads to prevent bad behavior.
I didn't say they couldn't show ads, but basic ads aren't the only way that these places monetize. Trackers, 'you might also like' panels, etc all feed in to the overall monetization strategy. A couple of amp-approved ads on an amp-page don't necessarily make up for all that...
I'm not trying to avoid anything. As a user I don't even get a choice for AMP or no AMP. In fact, I changed my search engine on my phone to DuckDuckGo specifically to get rid of AMP pages.
As a dev at a major publisher I can confirm that we are making money off these pages, and readers are actually clicking on more recirculation links. The monetization isn't stripped out at all, it's just all sandboxed in iframes.
Hate to break it to you, but major publishers aren't making any money of the AMP'd version of their pages - most of the monetization is stripped out, and readers aren't even actually on their site so they won't stay and click around.