If it doesn't have - at minimum - a skip button on it, I will go out of my way to avoid your service, not use the advertised services, and block/remove whatever I can if I ever do need to use them.
It's quite simple. While you're reasonable, so am I. I'll let you stuff an advert into your free video, so long as I can skip it. If I can't skip it, then I won't bother with your video. I'll even let you have a clearly-stated "advertising funded program" (e.g. UKTV Play, 4oD, etc. but they tend to give up once you've watched a couple of sets of adverts in a 24 hour period and just play what you want without ads). But equally I'm quite at liberty to go make a sandwich while they play and come back when my program comes back on.
But when you try to shove them into places they don't belong, they need to be skippable. Like Prime video - no, I don't care about those other series you have. I really DO NOT CARE. I clicked on this series because I want to watch this series, and I pay annually for that privilege. Stop advertising at me. Luckily they have the sense to have a skip button.
But when you try to play when I scroll away (FACEBOOK!), when you auto-play when I didn't ask (lots of places), when you jump to another video at the end without my permission (BBC News!), when you force me to sit through ads to get to crap that I haven't even seen a bit of yet, you can find yourself another viewer somewhere else. In fact, doing that stuff is the perfect way for me to flee from your content entirely before I've ever looked at it.
Seriously, if I'm on a website I've never been on before, whether it's a product review or a game, whether it's a science article or an IT how-to instructional, if your video plays without me pressing explicit buttons to make it do that, or if there's noise and Chrome says it's coming from your tab, or if you jump in my face and won't get out of my way, then I literally just close the tab and never go back.
I know you want to force me to watch it. But you don't make ANYTHING vaguely inticing, interesting or worth watching. Seriously, I'm an IT guy and the adverts I get are all "how to maximise your business synergy" junk anyway. Show me an ad for something relevant (even a computer game would do), make it interesting, make me go "Oh, wow, that looks good". But you can't. Because you're just selling junk and don't really care that nobody wants to see that junk. Even the media companies have basically given up, by the looks of it.
When TV was king, we were all singing their theme tunes, using their sayings ("You know when you've been...", "Philadelphia?", "Mildness is a cigar called...", "Easily turn-off-and-on-able"). Tell me ONE online advertising campaign that you actually remember, that your mates would know, that was catchy or enticing in its own right.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
