Skip to main content

An Open Letter to #Mashable, #Nerdist, #MamaMia and other sites that over use Auto Play Video Ads

Dear #Mashable, #Nerdist, #MamaMia and other sites that over use Auto Play Video Ads,

Remember back in the early days of the internet when display ads, pop-up ads and pop-unders ads were largely frowned upon but we eventually got used to these things because they helped make content free?

Well I can assure you the same is never going to be said for embeded Auto Play Video Ads. Especially when they're used so poorly by sites such as yours.



I"m not opposed to advertising. I'm not even opposed to video advertising. Heck I earn income from ads myself. What I object to is multiple embeded video ads on one page, all set to auto play, along with embeded display ads, fly out menus, additional featured story lists and comment loaders all trying to display their part of the page whilst getting completely in the way of the page's ability to load the content I actually clicked over to see.

I'm sick of trying to play a featured video on a site when up to four other auto play video ads are all trying to load and play even though they're not even on screen. Often the ad players will all be trying to play the same ads. What happens then is the actual video I came to see takes ages to load, if at all. When the video does play it stops and starts, buffers constantly, and only plays every 10th frame if I"m lucky.

If I try to read the accompanying article whilst I'm waiting the page refuses to scroll because the ads and video ads are still loading causing the entire page to slow down. If it does scroll at all it'll jump down a page at a time even though I'm not using the page down feature. Trying to scroll back up meets with a similar issue making reading the article virtually impossible.

And don't even get me started on your next to useless mobile sites that try to display some of the ad content, often failing miserably and almost as often crashing the browser on my mobile devices.

Enough already.

Remember 'content is king'. That hasn't changed. I'm far beyond losing count of the number of times I've clicked onto your sites, with your click bait headlines, and then had so much trouble accessing the content I came to see. It's enough time for me to think to myself... "You know what? I don't actually care what this article was about." I shut down the page. Content unseen. Ads ignored.

Way to go. I hope your poor implementation of video ads is only affecting a minority because I'd hate to think of all the ad revenue you might be earning if you know... you didn't cripple your content with auto play video ads and other plug-ins.

Regards

TET


Click image to enlarge.

Comments

  1. I don't know about all that but I used to get videos starting on my page automatically which added to me using too much of my internet or whatever it was, until I changed to having more for less money which doesn't affect me now.

    I think it was you who told me I could go select for the videos not to start auto, but I don't know if that's what you're talking about. I can't remember where it was I went into now, but it would be Settings I expect and that fixed that up. What I get now is when they send me things in an email from Twitter to see the most poplar videos, they start playing as you scroll, but, as I found out, you have to click them to hear the sound. This can divert you sometimes to looking at some stuff until you realise and either close or delete the email.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I'm talking about on Face Book of course.

      Delete
    2. I'm talking about on regular Magazine/blog/Newspaper style websites which don't come with settings you can adjust - would be great if they did.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Comments are moderated by an actual human (me, TET) and may not publish right away. I do read all comments and only reject those not directly related to the post or are spam/scams (I'm looking at you Illuminati recruiters... I mean scammers. Stop commenting on my Illuminati post!).

Buy Whimsical Cat Art Prints by TET (Redbubble Store)

Enjoy Your Favorite TET Art Up Close, Interactive, and so Relaxing!

Enjoy Your Favorite TET Art Up Close, Interactive, and so Relaxing!
Relax and Challenge Yourself with a Fun, Whimsical Cat Art Jigsaw - 30-1000 pieces. Click Image for More.

Popular posts from this blog

New Cat Art Collaboration: TET's Cats Paintings and OpenArt AI Model Workspace (Photobooth)

TET's Cats AI generated art trained on my own art style. Way back in the early 2000's I started painting stylized cat artworks to illustrate some cat themed poems I'd written, that I exhibited and sold online in an exhibition titled 'Sleeping Cats' in 2004. You can see all these early works in my Flickr Album . Many are also available to buy as prints in my RedBubble Store . Leading on from that I began selling my paintings on ebay where the cat themed works were almost guaranteed to sell over any other subject I painted. As a result I became some what known for my cat art to the point where people would commission me to create images of their own pet cats in my cartoony style. Flash forward a decade (almost two at this point) and I haven't painted any cat themed art in years. To be honest I haven't done any traditional painting at all in years. In the last couple of years AI image generators have really caught my attention. Specifically that they are able t...

"Ya Mum Reads it..."

You'l find my own Photography in this blog too. Quite a while back I did a survey that tells you what kind of audience credibility your blog has. I'm not sure what the score was but I do remember the commentary which boiled down to "Your mother reads your blog regularly but you probably don't have much wider appeal". Fuck you survey! (Hi Mum, sorry for cursing! I do appreciate you reading, really I do!) I don't know how many regular readers I have, if any, but I do know, on average this blog receives more than 4000 page hits per month, much of it coming from search engines like Google. Perhaps of some interest is my new current top search entry point of all time, people looking for Bert and Ernie,  who I wrote some commentary about when it was officially announced that the Sesame Street Characters were not gay . Which is quite a departure from Krippin Virus from a few years back when the movie I am Legend came out. The thing about this blog is t...

TET Artwork Diary: Nansen The Cabin Boy's Cat of the Belgian Sailing Ship, RV Belgica, Trapped in an Antarctica Winter, 1897

Belgica in the ice. 1897. Photo: Adrien de Gerlache   Y ou wouldn't ordinarily think of cats and penguins together in the same image but that's what I found myself creating when thinking of an idea for my next painting. I have painted penguins before as part of my Australian Animals series from the early 2000's, and I have a couple of cartoon  penguins (that you can see in a very old post, Designing Formal Penguins ) I created for a Yeti skateboard graphic, so, I didn't just randomly think, 'penguins'. Recently I had a revelation about my art, in that I don't simply paint pictures of cats, I paint 'relationships'. Almost all of my paintings of cats feature two or more cats, or a cat with something, such as a butterfly, bird, fish, goat... and why not a penguin? However, I didn't want to just paint some random cat with some random penguin. I wondered if there was ever any real cats in history that may have a reason to meet a penguin? Turns out, on...

Movie Review: Project Hail Mary (2026) *No Spoilers*

T his wasn't a movie I particularly wanted to see even though it's right in my wheelhouse, realistic Sci-fi. However, after Project Hail Mary did so well in theatres it became a movie I wanted to check out once it reached streaming. In this case I watched it on Amazon Prime Video. It wasn't really on my radar because, on the surface, it's not anything I haven't seen before, even quite recently. Lone astronaut goes on some kind of mission, mission fails, astronaut tries to salvage the mission and somehow finds a way home. However, in my opinion, what makes this film different is in the detail. There are a lot of often seen tropes here presented in new ways, that may capture your imagination. The movie opens with science teacher, Ryland Grace (Ryan Gosling), waking up from deep sleep on a spaceship, far from Earth, with no memory of why he is there. Presumably a side effect of basically being put in storage while the spaceship travels across vast distances. From the...

Embarrassing Yourself with Doof Doof Music

Ever since Spinal Tap popularized the notion of turning an amp up to eleven audio systems have been rising to the challenge of louder, more awesome sound. In particular, car audio systems have embraced the notion of the bigger the noise the better the sound must surely be. What I'd like to know is, if these sound systems are so good, why do they make all music sound the same... Doof, Doof, Doof? You've all heard them. Pimped up cars, with audio systems seemingly worth more than gold, volume blasting way past eleven. Sound waves booming long before you make a positive visual on the car... Doof, Doof, Doof. It has to be the audio system right? Surely all these people can't be playing the same tune? Doof, Doof, Doof. Could it be that the more money spent on a car sound system the less musical range it will actually play? Maybe these people can't afford to buy music after purchasing the audio system so they all play the same demo track? Doof, doof, doof. In my own car I hav...

Movie Review: Spider-Man: Brand New Day (2026) *No Spoilers*

T his is the first time in quite a while we've seen a live action Spider-Man that is, essentially, a fully formed, grown up superhero, fighting crime on his own terms rather than looking to mentors to guide him.  In  Spider-Man: Brand New Day  it's four years after the events of Spider-Man: No Way Home . No one knows who Peter Parker is but Spider-Man has become a local legend, helping to keep New York free of crime. Personally, Peter is still struggling with not reconnecting with his former friends, whose lives are again put at risk when a new foe crosses his path. If you're a fan of Tom Holland's Spider-Man films, and the MCU in general this film should not only not disappoint, you may even consider it to be one of the best MCU films you've seen in a while. I really enjoyed all the quick cameos by small time Spider-Man villains even though I don't know many of them. Their inclusion really started to broaden the scope of the character, despite this installment ...

Review: ArtHelper - The All-In-One AI Writing + Marketing Assistant for Artists - 'ChatGPT for Artists'

ArtHelper prides itself on being all 'human-made' art. T he idea of an AI, trained specifically on art business marketing, that can not only offer advice on marketing your work, but also assist with creating all the content too, is certainly appealing. Especially to those of us who would rather spend more time creating our art than trying to sell it. ArtHelper does just that whilst attempting to be your 'home' on the internet. A destination for your profile and portfolio, a marketplace for your art, and a directory of artists as well, with one distinction - all the art must be human made. Which, for you AI artists, doesn't count the prompt for AI generated art - because the idea, according to ArtHelper's creators, isn't the art. Which is a fair point, in terms of promoting art 'made by a human', but can get kind of murky when you understand that not all AI art is generated from a single prompt... and 'found object art' isn't actually ...