Fairfax to cut intrusive website video

Australian-based newspaper publisher Fairfax plans to abandon the "autoplay" policy its metropolitan media division has for advertisements on its websites, says media and marketing news website Adnews.

On a lot of Fairfax websites, videos start autoplaying after a few seconds, unless the user stops it.

A major Australian advertising agency, UM, this year stopped running clients' ads across Fairfax Media's video network, saying the autoplay videos were annoying users and making them hostile to advertisers.

Advertisers were reported to be concerned their ads were playing unwatched because a user had scrolled down the page -- or that their brands were potentially associated with videos annoying consumers.

Adnews reported Fairfax would drop its autoplay policy from September ahead of a major expansion of its online video offering intended to position the publisher as a rival to TV networks.

Fairfax NZ launches video
On this side of the Tasman, Fairfax Media in February launched the first digital TV offering by a New Zealand website on news site Stuff.co.nz. Its twice-weekly online short programme, The Breakdown, has been covering the 2011 Super Rugby competition.

In Australia, commercial director at Fairfax Digital, Media, Ed Harrison, told AdNews autoplay would be phased out in the "coming months", but not before September as clients had already forward booked the video format.

Harrison said the decision was taken after months of talks with agencies, but denied an agency backlash was behind the move.

"Autoplay has been important in one big way and that's to get our audiences heavily exposed to video consumption on Fairfax websites," he said. "Our brands are not known for their video content, so now we have a very broad audience to consume video content."

Fairfax would now expand its online video services launching internet television services to help build an evening audience and become less reliant on the news-heavy daytime audience.

He estimated the overall online video market at $A50 million ($NZ61.5 million).