I haven’t met one person who enjoys visiting a website that plays music or audio automatically when the site loads.

What is the first thing visitors do? Watch them…they hit the back button, or try and find the stop/ pause button to shut the sound off. WHY would companies want to annoy their visitors like this? Are customers supposed to frequent the site? Will they enjoy hearing the same message over and over again each time they go to the site….wait a minute…they probably won’t be back.

Over the past few days, I have come across a few sites that have force-fed me video that loads automatically. One was a pretty prominant SEO (Search Engine Optimization) company’s site, and the other was a cleverly designed affiliate marketing site that tried to sell me the instant that the site loaded. Both video segments were high quality.

Give me a break. Let me soak in the site and figure out what the company is all about before trying to annoy me with auto-loading video.

Now, I don’t mind video links on websites. In fact, I think it is a great way to get a message across, and it can be very effective. However, let ME choose when I view it. 

I just hope that sites like the examples mentioned above don’t ruin the perfectly good using-video-to-promote-yourself trend that is out there. That would be a shame.  

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