The Internet I Know Has Changed: Autoplay Video Ads Have Hurt The User Experience

I have been using the Internet for a long time now. The websites that I visited ten years ago have changed - at least most of them. Websites are becoming more complex with each passing year. New technologies are being developed. The Web Developers are working to provide more features to the users. The size of a webpage has also increased to what it used to be just a decade ago.

The old websites (of around the 2000s) had just texts - that too default ones - and sometimes images. Their size was around 50 kb. Nowadays, websites are using icons, different fonts, high-resolution images, and, most importantly, videos. These contents increase the size of the page massively. The size of a webpage, which used to be around 50k kb a couple of decades ago, is now around 4-5 mb on average.

The features offered by websites are improving, but it is also increasing the size of the webpage, which makes it difficult to provide the best possible user experience to a wide range of audience.

One of the most recent things I have been watching on modern websites is the autoplay video ads.

When you click on the news article to read about that particular topic, you are shown a random video from the site, and that too is forcibly overlayed on the top of the website contents, and you are made to watch that 30s video advertisement before being able to close it (Yes, I am talking about you CNN).

If we take the example of a popular Indian news website NDTV, it provides the best content you can read for free online, but it also forcibly auto-plays the videos, which is a great thing for a news website, but they are annoying and are bad for user experiences.

I have personally found these audio-play video ads very annoying. The ads companies like Vdo.ai usually show these autoplay video players.

There are a lot of people who use mobile data to browse the internet, and these autoplay video ads are one of the biggest problems. By default, autoplay videos are muted, so people do not even know about the videos playing, and a lot of their mobile data gets wasted on it.

The websites should handle these issues, especially the big ones. They should focus on giving the best experience to them instead of earning a few more bucks.

Nowadays, all major websites use video ads, so people have no choice but to open these sites. The website creators know about this. There is also a lot of competition in the internet field nowadays, so websites tend to increase the revenue they can from an individual by showing him many ads - sometimes even 10 or 15. But it is also crucial for them to know that it is the quality they provide that attracts the readers, and that is why the user experience should be most prioritized, even above monetization.

Also published here.