Video ads: The only good autoplay is a dead autoplay
I can’t hear you, la la la – no really I cannot hear you over this racket
You find me this week in Angoulême during the famous annual comics festival. I am here in an official capacity as an unofficial photographer for an American comics website. It is utter bedlam here, as if a rave party of slightly overweight men and women in black hoodies and carrying kawaii-manga tote bags took over a town and kept jostling in queues for 96 hours straight.
The only respite can be found in the Publishing Rights Market marquee, where deals are done between comics writers, artists and publishers for contacts worth up to as much as several euros. Times are hard.
I also use the word “respite” literally as the organisers of this particular tent have installed a siesta room where you can book a 20-minute snooze. After you enter the hidden sanctum, nobody is allowed to disturb you or even open the door an inch, not even to make sure you haven’t done a runner with the cushions.
A pair of noise-cancelling headphones and I’m dead to the world for my allotted 20 minutes.
Drifting off, I was reminded of something I wrote about noise roughly a decade ago when the social media video boom was starting to take off and TikTok was still three years away from being launched. You can cover your eyes but even with these headphones it’s very difficult to shut out noise, not completely. As we were discovering around 2010 onwards, humans react very differently to sound and vision when it’s not wanted.
Here’s what I wrote back then…
It was a quiet morning at the office. The early risers among the team were settling gently at their desks and discreetly going about their business. All that could be heard was the swish of papers, the soft clicking of mice and several varieties of birdsong.
Birdsong? I thought I might be suffering the effects of the previous late night, since a windowless, air-conditioned office in central London is not the most likely place to perceive avian conversation. Did I really hear it? I strained to listen. Nothing.
And then... Chirrrp. Chirrrp. Weet.
This time it was followed by a giggle and an apology from one of my colleagues. She had been asked to review a book – one of those old-school types made of a collection of paper sheets, bound together – on the subject of back-garden ornithology. It came with a glued-in gadget that produced 100 audio samples of birdsong at will. Or in certain cases, regardless of will: if you picked up the book in the wrong way, it would squawk at you.
Naturally, she was a thorough tester and could do no less than test each of the 100 samples to find out if they worked correctly; some had to be checked several times, just to be sure.
That means the rest of us had to sit through several hundred cheeps, craws and twit-twoos for the next hour. And to be honest, it was lovely. Call me a closet Bill Oddie if you like, but it was a revelation to hear the pure sound of birds chirping to each other… that is, without some twat in the background hammering, drilling or mowing the lawn.
It was also a revelation because up until this moment, I have always assumed that publications that make noises are hateful little things. Nor do I believe I am alone in holding this opinion. People will happily allow video to play and animations to pop up when they bop about the interwebs, but woe betide any website that stoops so low as to start playing an audio file without receiving prior permission in carbon triplicate.
It might have something to do with the fact that you can shut off a video quickly, or at least you feel that you can, or at the very least you can put your hand in front of the screen or just look away.
With audio, however, web interfaces are not always terribly generous in making it easy to identify where the ’Stop It You Noisy Bastard’ button is located on-screen.
Imagine what happens when a video begins to autoplay on a site that I visit using my laptop. If the video annoys me, I can scroll downward or look away; but when the audio stream kicks in, that’s no help to me or my colleagues sitting nearby. I know this from experience. Sticking my fingers in my ears while an unexpected din blasts out the system speakers never seems to calm my work colleagues. In fact, they look even crosser with me than if I’d done nothing to abate the noise at all. Ungrateful bunch.
Indeed the aforementioned book of birdsong was a far cry from the audio-enhanced Old MacDonald storybook Mme D and I bought for my firstborn when she was little. Any doting parent will know what I’m talking about: a hardback book with a colourful thick strip down the right-hand side with buttons that play scratchy, tinny sounds relevant to certain passages in the story. Kids love them but parents hate them – which is why kids love them.
Tinny is not the word: I can barely begin to describe the jarring cacophony produced by this harmless-looking toy. It was like having a circular saw fitted with spinning knives being thrust into your ear and pulled out through your nose. I seriously doubt the gushing educational claims made of audio-enhanced books, although I suppose a copy of our Old MacDonald could have inspired Clive Barker to write Hellraiser.
My wife and I tried "accidentally" sitting, treading and jumping on the notoriously repetitive and obsessive stock-checking farmer’s electronic menagerie, but they kept on rattling the windows with their high-decibel mooing and clucking. I tried to prise open the case to remove the battery but it seemed to have been moulded from seamless kevlar. As we explained patiently to our little toddler at the time, nothing on God’s Earth was going to shut the fucking thing up.
In the end, we persuaded her that she’d outgrown nursery rhymes and consigned the evil gift to waste collection. Sometimes, in the middle of the night, I think I can still hear it calling me with a ghostly baa baa here, baa baa there from six feet under a nearby landfill.
Or maybe I’m still flashing back to early 1990s Soundgarden in which a nice man at the beginning of Searching with My Good Eye Closed cheerfully introduces the sounds of various farm animals, only to conclude with “The devil says...” followed by an unearthly howl before the song kicks in.
Whether you press a button to trigger the noise or allow it to invade your aural space automatically, audio comes across much more intrusive and less easy to manage, even less trustful, than video. And heavy metal is a case in point. Remember the Judas Priest ’backmasking’ scare? For those of you whose gonads have yet to drop, Judas Priest was a popular British beat combo (dig it, man) who were accused of poisoning the minds of two gun-toting Suicidal Sids in the US by supposedly recording subliminal audio messages in certain tracks which were said could only be deciphered by playing the record (yes, a gramophone LP, keep with the scene, daddio) backwards.
As the band’s manager told Fortean Times magazine some 20 years later, if they had bothered to insert a subliminal message in the album, it would have been something more along the lines of “Buy another five copies”.
So there we have it: audio is intrusive, untrustworthy and potentially evil.
These things weigh upon my mind as I oversee the development of a commercial website that I acquired and plan to relaunch. Working through the checklist of minimum requirements (supports remote posting – tick; adaptive to any screen size – tick; etc) I stumbled over how to enable accessibility.
For those of you unaware of such things, websites intended for the general public have a legal obligation to be accessible and usable by as many people as possible, including those with seeing and hearing difficulties.
I can ensure the visuals are zoomable and will even work with popular magnifying utilities pretty much by adhering to clean W3 principles but should I leave poor-sighted blighters to install and set up their own screen-readers?
There are nifty tricks we could incorporate with video that will raise our profile and increase visits among the hard of hearing, and even among the able-bodied. But if I do the same thing with embedded audio, we’ll become figures of hate and objects of bile.
Surprisingly enough, making punters hate you tends to encourage them to keep their wallets firmly in their pockets.
Irrational it may be, but lots of people don’t mind when video plays automatically – the younger generation absolutely love that kind of intrusive shit – but they usually hate it when audio does the same thing. I can’t afford to dick around when money is on the line.
Should I leave audio well alone? What do you say? Is it an oink-oink here or a cockadoodle there?
Alistair Dabbs is a freelance technology tart, juggling IT journalism, editorial training and digital publishing. For a long time he found digital audio media as boring as it is insidious. This was the result of listening to an audiobook for the first, and only, time: read by Charles Dance with all the enthusiasm of a 14-year-old staring out of a school window while his classmates declined Latin verbs. Today, he is developing into an audio-editing fiend, so beware.
Simple way of controling the audio. Have an external speaker connected and the volume/on/off control within reach. Mine is almost always off.
I hate the squeeks, pops and bells of a PC, I can tell when something is happening without a computer generated noise that harks back to the dawn of the computer age.
I’m sure we’ve all visited web pages where some ad in the corner starts up a video and you can’t stop it because other ads are getting in on the act too. Any regional news site in the UK works like this, courtesy of what used to be called Trinity Mirror. The fact that readers are massively turned off by this and don’t actually want to read about some latest ponzi scheme seems to be beyond them.