Author Topic: Why Blubrry Media Players Don't Allow Autoplay  (Read 4907 times)

Shawn Thorpe

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Why Blubrry Media Players Don't Allow Autoplay
« on: May 12, 2016, 03:21:47 pm »
All media players made by Blubrry, including those available within PowerPress, do not have an option to turn on autoplay.

If you're unsure what autoplay is, it's a process used by some media player so that anytime a piece of rich media (audio, video) automatically begins to play when a web page is loaded by a browser. Click any YouTube link and you'll see autoplay in action.

Three reasons why Blubrry media players don't allow autoplay:

1.) Best practices:
All Blubrry tools and services conform to best practices that have been developed over the last decade in the podcasting industry. No reputable media hosting/statistics provider has ever supported or recommended autoplay.

2.) It's annoying: Ever click a link from an e-mail or social media site that takes you to a page that begins blaring loud audio that you weren't expecting? It's annoying and it only happens when the media on that page is set to autoplay. As a podcaster, you don't want your first impression to a potential new subscriber to be filled with aggravation. But that's likely what will happen if new visitors are constantly met by autoplaying media on your site.

3.) Artificial stats inflation: When you look at your podcast stats, you want to see a true, real-world representation of your audience. Autoplay can artificially inflate podcast download numbers because the downloads triggered thru autoplay aren't necessarily being created by humans who are genuinely interested in consuming your content. If someone clicks thru to your podcast site and a media file begins to autoplay and they immediately click away, that autoplay could be counted as a download when, in actuality, no one even heard the episode that was counted. Imagine this happening hundreds or thousands of times a day. Your podcast stats would be rife with inaccurate data. Everyone loves to log into their stats and see big numbers. But those numbers are meaningless if they don't represent a real audience. Some podcasters believe that "big numbers" are the key to success. But having an active, engaged audience will do more in the long term for most shows than artificially inflated stats could ever do. Like Twitter bombing, using autoplay to artificially pump up a podcast's download numbers will do very little to help a podcast grow and succeed.

For more reasons why autoplay is discouraged, see this page in the Blubrry podcasting manual:
http://create.blubrry.com/manual/your-web-site/providing-a-web-player/
« Last Edit: May 12, 2016, 05:59:15 pm by Shawn Thorpe »