Would you PLEASE not autoplay video with the sound on when I arrive on your home page? And most especially not when they are advertisements. Thanks so much.
TheStreet.com did this for a few days this week with a series on totally dumb video ads from Microsoft that autoplayed with audio *every* time you arrived on or went back to the homepage. Sometimes the video was at the bottom of the page so you had to scroll down to turn it off. Were they trying to drive people away? (They were even doing it on RealMoney, one of their pay sites, but are no more, probably because everyone including me complained.)
The Microsoft ad apparently is part of their new $300 million ad campaign designed to make them cool again. Ah, no. An ad where someone emerges out of a mud bath you are lounging in to give you money for using Microsoft Live Search is many things (ludicrous? stupid? bribery?) but cool is most definitely not one of them.
Websites: if you must autoplay video, do so with the audio off. And don’t replay it every time I return to the home page from another page on your site.
If you were using Firefox with NoScript or Flashblock extensions, you wouldn’t have to worry about this. 🙂 I can go there an get no crappy flash ads with lots of noise, whenever I want.
The ads are part of and precede their news videos. So, the plugin probably wouldn’t work effectively. Sigh.