Websites that auto-play videos upon entering a page

a pet peeve of mine that has been getting more and more common in the world of web design is pages that start auto-playing videos when you enter them. I guess its a way to increase view counts and ad-revenue but man, its super annoying to me.

aside from something like youtube where the entire reason you are there is to watch videos, I can't think of a single instance where I like this feature. Often this happens on written articles where some semi-related video at the top of the page starts playing when I really want to just read the damn article. If I want to watch the video i'll play it when I'm ready. Sometimes they will have audio and I'll scroll down and start reading only to have some random voice start talking, forcing me to find the video and pause it.

Does anyone else feel this way? its not a huge thing but it seems to be the new standard in web page design and I think its stupid

Annoying as hell, agreed.

I hate it as well and I have also been noticing the trend. It's even more annoying when, as you say, the video takes a while to start so you're halfway down the article and have to lose your place to scroll back up and stop the damn video.

I don't like it at all. It's a terrible practice from a user viewpoint.

Not only I hate it, there's a thread here in Bug Reporting & Feedback asking about autp-play videos and yeah, it's super annoying. I get that ads makes revenue money on sites but auto-play is a pain in the but.

Also I notice now most sites are always asking to "please disable adblock" which is so shady & a dick move by sites and the whole purpose for me to using adblock was to keep those annoying ads out of my screen.

Yeah, I hate it too.

this is a bit more understandable to me since using ad-blockers prevents the site getting revenue. Some people might not realise this so I can live with a one-time popup explaining why ad-blockers hurt the site.

I've seen some sites that don't even let you enter with an ad-blocker which is going too far imo

Yep. Garbage tactics....

I don't know about the rest of you, but I've been online since the days of dial-up, and this kind of thing isn't going away anytime soon. The reason I installed an ad-blocker in the first place was because some sites would have so many damn ads I literally couldn't scroll without running into lag issues. I thought "there's no way this sort of thing is going to become common, right?" Wrong. After that it was the pop-up ads that, again, cause slowdown issues, and again I thought "this can't become common, right?" Wrong. Then as soon as adblockers start becoming common on PC's it starts on mobile. Reading an article, halfway through an ad pops up, interrupts me, and takes me back to the top of the page. "Can't become common, right?" Wrong. How about ads that play ten times as loud as the shows they're played during and end up blowing out my speakers, can't become common, right? Wrong.

I'm not sure if advertisers are the dumbest people on earth or the most self-serving, or maybe both, but they will do literally anything to get your attention, even in a bad way. If they do something that every other person on earth finds disturbing they will justify it by the fact that people are paying attention. And if you don't believe me remember, these are the people who at one time were literally researching a form of mind control in order to sell soda.

It's poor website design practice.

Hate having to find that tab where the sound is coming from.

I find more annoying where "Say you searching for 10 best video games or movies of 2017 ' takes you page after page upto 10 than putting all in 1 page. Little content too for a whole page for a single game or movie LOL.

@indzman: And then you have an ad page every 3 or 4 regular ones and the final slide isn't even for what you were searching but the first slide of something else :p

*cough* gamespot *cough* *cough*

I find myself right clicking every tab at work and muting it. I'm not too fussed about videos autoplaying, it's the sound. Play but silently like fb on our phones.

I look at it the same way I view Microtransactions. Eventually people will get sick of it and start looking for an alternative that doesn't use shady practices to make money.

Didn't/Won't buy Battlefront 2 and my time on this site grows more limited by the day.

@with_teeth26: Usually, these are part of affliate marketing campaigns where you end up on their page with a certain video playing automatically and if you try to close it, you would be re-directed to some other website. Annoying as hell to most, but yet it's still a multi-billion dollar industry because people can still potentially be suckers for it and buy the product, especially if it relates to them.

It's cancer

Facebook does it on phone app, it's the reason by default my volume is normally on mute

I hate it as well. It's even worse if the video follows you after scrolling past it

The reason I first installed adblocker....no it was originally called popup blocker back in those days....was because on a system with less than 64 MB of RAM and less than 150MHz of processing power running Windows 95/98SE, popups use to eat so much resources that it would slow my computer to a crawl, thus a popup blocker came in handy.

Then I finally got a new system strong enough to run Windows XP with 128 MB of RAM and about 266MHz of processing power. Thought to myself that "Hey, I can finally take on popups or animated flash ads, no problem! So I don't need no stinkin popup blocker!". Got proven wrong quickly when I first discovered adware viruses that spammed a volley of popups enough to crash my system. The last straw before I went back to installing a popup blocker was being hit a few times with that one particularly annoying popup that didn't want to close no matter how many times you try to exit it out...

Then came the days where animated flash ads became annoying. They originally weren't so bad because they used to be small and out of the way. But then as years went by, they started to get bigger and demanded so much resources, started making noises when your mouse accidentally travels over them, then began causing flash player to stop responding which led to my browser crashing often. That's when I had enough and discovered Ad blockers which I consider a must have component for the internet...

Reason why I keep an ad blocker handy now is because I've acquired some nasty viruses that seem to piggyback off of certain ads. That, and ads compared to how they were 10+ years ago are no longer inconspicuous but are now obnoxious, in your face, disrupting webpage layouts, floating over content you're TRYING to look at, causing pages to take 10+ seconds to load up, making unwanted noises in the background, and redirecting you to other sites when you try exiting them out or clicking around them. Yeah, they aren't making it very appealing for me NOT to want to use adblock...

That's about one of the few reason I don't like this site for is autoplay it articles even if I have the video on adblock something keeps getting autoplayed anyway so I have to mute the tab. If I wanted to watch the video I would click on myself don't need autoplay.
And I also hate every other website that does this as well.

It's super annoying.

I disabled auto play from Youtube, as well as Steam and other software as soon as I found out there was an option to turn it off...

Haven't found an option to turn off GS autoplay yet, I just want to read an article. Don't want to watch some unrelated video.

Yes, I hate it when I'm in a meeting and browsing pronhub and a video automatically starts before giving me a chance to mute.

If it is with sound, close tab.

@tocool340: Yup. If these websites want to complain about losing revenue then they should be a bit more proactive in making their sites accessible. I actually had one today where, I don't know how all this got through my adblocker, but first there were like three notifications about alerts that partially obscured the article I was reading, then a full page ad that took me back to the top when I closed it, then some sponsored video playing automatically with sound. The kicker? The article was about how to turn off annoying Windows alerts, and the author spent half of it complaining about how annoying they were.

Any kind of intrusive advertising should be illegal.