[nichodges]

This is a short term revenue grab from Facebook, but one that will probably harm their long term position with the media agencies that buy their inventory.

Autoplay videos have been widely criticised by advertisers and agencies over the past few years. While the interruption is a bad user experience (yes, advertisers do care about that), it's the results that are the issue. Publishers started reporting ridiculously high completion rates, just because the video auto-played and then the user scrolled down.

The result in a lot of markets is that the major media agency groups have stated they will not buy autoplay. What will be interesting to see is if the same groups can say no to Facebook. While I would say most will happily support the move to not buy autoplay, I would fear that most advertisers are so frothy on Facebook that they don't care if their ad interrupts and irritates the user.

The challenge for Facebook (and the leverage the advertisers and agencies will have) is that they need the major advertisers and agency groups. As opposed to text-based ads, you can't rely on the long tail for good-quality video advertising.

(Disclosure: I work for one of the major media agency groups.)