[abrown28]

By the time I scrolled down the video had finished playing then went to the next video. I then refreshed the page and scrolled down quickly only to find they had added a big banner over the video telling about the next video in the queue. I'm not sure I'm ever going back to smithsonianmag.com

EDIT: Capturing a light sonic boom is still pretty cool though :)

[dawnerd]

Whats with this trend with sites having auto playing videos below the fold and hidden away? Almost every news site does it now. Worst is when they have a flash ad on top so all you see is the click to play overlay trying to figure out where the video is. AHHH!

[infectoid]

Maybe they are hacking the stats. "We had 95% of readers view the video. Give us more ad dollrz!"

[dawnerd]

Having worked on eHow I can say pretty confidently that's what they're doing. Probably helps their ad sales people too.

[Macha]

As someone working in adtech, some of the megabytes of JS you get sent involves viewability tracking to catch stuff like this. Sometimes you'll even have two or more copies, one from the advertiser and some from the companies in between.

[sfifs]

No major advertiser actually trusts what publishers claim - even the big ones like FB and YouTube though they are much less likely to be actively gaming you. That's why there's a lot of tracking JS in pages for viewability to catch stuff like this.

[codeddesign]

It's called "outstream" video ads. (instream would be a pre-roll where it plays over another video you are wanting to watch)

The publisher has not control over this and probably doesn't realize it's happening, it's purely the 3rd party ad provider they are using that is controlling that.

There are standards in which most ad companies follow (user must be 25% in view, ads must be muted...etc), but recently a large number of Israeli based ad firms have begun running outstream ads without these standards. The purpose is to drive up the view and completion rates. This gives them access to larger media buyers and higher fill rates (filling video ads for every page load is very hard to achieve)

Reference: years of being in the video ad industry

[CamperBob2]

If they were smart, they'd be working at Google, I guess.

[KON_Air]

By the time I got there it was something about Germany surrendering or a wedding. Here, a video that's more or less the article; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LrVoW097kUQ

[jakeogh]

You can disable JS and make a keybinding for youtube-dl. I hit F4 and X launches https://github.com/jakeogh/youtube-dl-wrapper

[executesorder66]

Looks like lots of other people had the same idea[0]

[0] http://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/smithsonianmag.com