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Comment by redm | Hacker News Reader

"auto-playing video ads with sound and “prestitial” ads that countdown before displaying content."

I guess Google will have to block ads on Youtube as well, not only does it have auto-playing ads with sound, but they block the display of content (prestitial/pre-roll).

Oh wait, Google standards never affect Google.

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I think there's a clear difference between an ad that plays sound as part of watching a video with sound, and as part of browsing a website that doesn't have sound / where the ad plays sound over the actual content.

So all you would need to do to make your autoplay video ad acceptable is place some of your content after it?

News websites already do things this way (have a text version of a news report, with an auto-playing video version of the same report embedded somewhere on the page, that has a pre-roll ad.) I'm not sure how Google will view that—I think it might come down to whether the user was expecting the video version of the news report.

Maybe, yeah. The point isn't to enforce some magical unicorn principle of advertising purity, it's to limit advertisements to forms that users are known not to hate.

Users have been OK with commercials in their TV shows for like six decades now. So my non-expert eyes would expect an ad embedded with video content to be broadly acceptable.

No - people would have to be expecting your content to autoplay, and then it would be okay.

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