How Facebook's Autoplay Videos Are Ushering in a New Era of Silent Storytelling

The impact goes beyond your news feed

Getting aurally blasted by a loud, autoplaying video ad while you're browsing online is certainly one of the more annoying experiences you can have on the Internet.

But when the volume default setting on such an ad unit is set to mute—giving viewers the choice to unmute—and when the video is embedded rather than storming the screen, the annoyance factor drops drastically. This is what Facebook has done with its silent autoplay in-feed videos, a format that has advertisers eagerly investing, and it's an approach that is also attracting plenty of competitors.

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