why do websites insist on autoplay videos?

[JEDI]

and no option to turn it off?

cnn is the biggest culprit for me.

do they get paid each time a video plays?

 

[Schmide]

^ this

 

[Crono]

It probably counts as a play for whatever metric.

Those sites aren't worth visiting. CNN included (or especially).

 

[TwiceOver]

I don't mind if a video auto plays, but at least minimize the volume...

 

[biostud]

I've just disabled it in firefox.

 

[Sonikku]

Use to have to deal with this on CBSnews. Just use an ad blocker and they'll "punish" you for it by asking you to disable it before it autoplays videos.

 

[dullard]

I left CNN for Reuters over this very issue. While I don't like Reuters as much as the former CNN, I haven't gone back. It was their choice to force videos, it was my choice to stop giving them my business. A good tradeoff if enough people did so.

You can set your video players (such as Adobe Flash) to require permission to play on each website. That solves about 90% of the forced videos.

 

[JEDIYoda]

why not? Auto play is the wave of the future!

 

[Mayne]

my computer is shit since its 8 years old and facebook will eventually crash my firefox after 30 minutes.

 

[Jaskalas]

Autoplay really angers me.
Would be a neat addon if you could disable videos until you clicked on the page.

 

[sportage]

Not to mention the data it uses up, if that is an issue.
If yo are fast enough you can PAUSE, but the video stream still loads even though it is paused.
I never click on articles that have a video symbol.
I know you will be forced to suffer thru a commercial first.
It's all a gimmick most of the time, anyway.

 

[PowerEngineer]

I posted the same lament earlier this year, and others pointed out to me that both Chrome and Firefox (I use the latter) allow you to control activation of plugins like Flash. Setting Flash to "ask to activate" largely solved this problem for me.

 

[JEDI]

I posted the same lament earlier this year, and others pointed out to me that both Chrome and Firefox (I use the latter) allow you to control activation of plugins like Flash. Setting Flash to "ask to activate" largely solved this problem for me.

sigh.. IE here

 

[Red Squirrel]

I hate that crap too.

 

[holden j caufield]

no one likes it. It's best to run noscript. Kind of cumbersome to setup but once it's dialed in, you only let the stuff you want to see through

 

[rh71]

flashcontrol extension worked well... unless it's html5?

 

[Humpy]

The negative reinforcement is doing a fantastic job of teaching me not to visit these websites.

 

[yllus]

One of the few ways websites still actually make money is not on page ads, but on pre-roll video ads. So there's a very strong incentive to autoplay videos on page load.

 

[Red Squirrel]

There seems to be so many annoying trends in general with websites now days.

The one that I hate the most is modals, that is those gray out screens that take over the whole page. Seems almost every single freaking site has them now days. News sites or any "information" sites seem to be the worse for that. When you google for how to do something or w/e and check all sorts of different random sites from the results that come up, I'd say almost 90% of them do this now. Ridiculous. Noscript only goes so far, most of those sites won't even LOAD without having to allow like 40 domains.

The second one that pisses me off is headers that stay. They minimize the scroll area. The home depot website is HORRIBLE for that now, they changed it recently. Half of your screen is the top header and then there's room for like 1 search result, and when you open you can't even see the whole picture of the item. This is worse on a laptop due to crappy resolution. People have to stop designing websites for 4k. Not everybody has that res, or even HD. On similar note another trend is to put those stupid twitter/facebook/etc buttons on the side. They block the text of what you're reading because they overlay on top and stay there when you scroll.

Why the hell so web designers make so much annoying crap now? I could go on about all sorts of other trends that are terrible too. It's like if they purposely try to make the site as horrible as possible. This trend is also extended to software, just look at windows 8, and while 10 is better, it's still bad compared to say, 7 or XP. UIs are suppose to be simple and intuitive, and not take up more room than they have to. But instead we're getting the opposite now.

 

[IronWing]

The trick is that just after installing a new browser, one should visit several newspaper websites. One can blacklist most egregious cookie monsters in just a few pages and be done with it.

 

[JimmiG]

One of the few ways websites still actually make money is not on page ads, but on pre-roll video ads. So there's a very strong incentive to autoplay videos on page load.

Yeah, they want the video ads to auto-play. The fact that a potentially interesting and informative video might play afterwards is just a side-effect. News websites exist to make money from ads, not to inform the public.

 

[Linux23]

There seems to be so many annoying trends in general with websites now days.

The one that I hate the most is modals, that is those gray out screens that take over the whole page. Seems almost every single freaking site has them now days. News sites or any "information" sites seem to be the worse for that. When you google for how to do something or w/e and check all sorts of different random sites from the results that come up, I'd say almost 90% of them do this now. Ridiculous. Noscript only goes so far, most of those sites won't even LOAD without having to allow like 40 domains.

The second one that pisses me off is headers that stay. They minimize the scroll area. The home depot website is HORRIBLE for that now, they changed it recently. Half of your screen is the top header and then there's room for like 1 search result, and when you open you can't even see the whole picture of the item. This is worse on a laptop due to crappy resolution. People have to stop designing websites for 4k. Not everybody has that res, or even HD. On similar note another trend is to put those stupid twitter/facebook/etc buttons on the side. They block the text of what you're reading because they overlay on top and stay there when you scroll.

Why the hell so web designers make so much annoying crap now? I could go on about all sorts of other trends that are terrible too. It's like if they purposely try to make the site as horrible as possible. This trend is also extended to software, just look at windows 8, and while 10 is better, it's still bad compared to say, 7 or XP. UIs are suppose to be simple and intuitive, and not take up more room than they have to. But instead we're getting the opposite now.

I hate the social media bars on the side of the page

 

[Spacehead]

and no option to turn it off?

I don't think i've ever had a video autoplay.

 

[balloonshark]

I'm trying to think of sites I visit that don't autoplay vids. Steam, Scout, Bing all autoplay until you select the option which is a freaking cookie. My cookies all get deleted when I wipe my sandbox after a browsing session so I start fresh every day. It's a daily battle just like finding the correct things to allow in noscript for a site to work.

 

[jpiniero]

I'm trying to think of sites I visit that don't autoplay vids. Steam, Scout, Bing all autoplay until you select the option which is a freaking cookie. My cookies all get deleted when I wipe my sandbox after a browsing session so I start fresh every day. It's a daily battle just like finding the correct things to allow in noscript for a site to work.

I'd just turn off HTML5 video and disable flash (or make flash only run on demand)