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REMEMBER HOW YOUR feed was full to the brim with videos of friends (and friends of friends) doing the ice bucket challenge?
Chances are there are still a number of videos doing the rounds, but if you think that was only a blip, then you may want to prepare yourself for more videos appearing in your news feed over the coming months.
According to Facebook, there have been an average of more than 1 billion video views on the service every day, with 65% happening on mobile.
Most of that would have been down to auto-play videos, but it’s enough for the company to start adding more features to increase video views even further.
Starting this week, any video that is posted publicly will now come with its own view counter showing how popular it is.
Also, another feature it’s testing is the ability to be presented with related videos, similar to how multiple articles appear whenever you select one directly from the site or app. In short, this means that more auto-play videos will begin appearing in your feed over the coming weeks and months.
The company has made no secret of its desire to tap into video advertising, and the traction its auto-play videos have received in recent weeks will have helped out.
Thankfully, you can turn off the auto-play function on the app so you don’t end up with any nasty phone bills.
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This feature drives me bats.
You can turn off autoplay in the iPhone settings – Facebook settings. Must be a similar feature on android. Not sure how to turn it off on desktop.
I did a piece on how to turn them off on both desktop and iOS/Android recently.
I included the link at the end of this piece, but in case you went straight down to the comments, here it is again (http://businessetc.thejournal.ie/facebook-auto-video-turn-off-1640664-Aug2014/).
Is there a way to turn them off on TheJournal app? They can be worse than the Facebook ones because they start playing when in the middle of reading an article..
Thank you @Petra
You’ve saved my sanity!
@Paperboy By right, they shouldn’t be playing automatically so I’m not sure what’s going on there (I was going through previous Vine articles on iOS/Android and none of them played automatically so I’m not sure how often that happens). Are there any articles in particular where this happened?
Thanks Quinton. Is there anyway to stop GIF’s? The flicker is quite sickening when you see them out of the corner of your eye while scrolling.
Quinton I have to agree with paperboy on this I have experienced it also but thought it was just my phone
I had an issue with vines playing automatically here. Think it was back around the time of the local election.
An app update fixed it though.
Quinton dude maybe it’s just me but I swear to God it just turns itself back on.
Sorry about this guys, it could possibly be a bug but it’s hard to tell what’s causing it without any real info (that’s why I was asking about articles earlier to try and pinpoint it).
The best I can do is highlight the issue with the tech team, but if you do come across it again, can you fire a mail with details to quinton[at]thejournal.ie?
Apologies for the vague response, but dealing with said issues is easier when we have as much info as possible and have a rough idea of what’s causing it.
The journal sometimes gestures autoplay vines in their articles which is equally intrusive and irritating.
*includes
Yeah and you can’t even see it because of all the text on the video.
Another reason to delete Facebook.. Never again will I bother with Facebook. Life is much better without it..
Digging their own grave.
And as for the new messenger app/function on facebook…… no no no
Delete delete delete
It’s actually easy to stop these videos. Here’s the link for the tutorial that I used, very handy, they were driving me mental before I found this:
Reading that back sounds like one of those “you won’t believe this simple trick to lose ten stone” ads but you’ll have to take my word for it I guess.
It you log into Facebook on your iPhone via Safari, you won’t have those annoying auto-playing videos. You’ll also seem to have fewer ads in your newsfeed, greater visibility of your Facebook own page, and you won’t have to switch to the annoying Messenger App to have a chat conversation. Here’s how:
Access Facebook.com through Safari and then save a bookmark to your home screen.
The only downside is that you’ll have to input your login details now and again. (which you could shortcut via Settings -> General -> Keyboard -> Add New Shortcut.
To me, the pros seem to outweighs any cons!
Also this will eat into your mobile data. You can turn it off in the settings menu on hour phone.
If there was another platform to move all my friends on to instead of Facebook I’d do it immediately. I don’t mean Twitter or pinterest either.
I want a network that isn’t selling me anything, second guessing what I like our selling my details to third parties
So it really is becoming FaceTube!
Its a pain in the swiss!
On Firefox at least there’s a little lego brick at the top left beside the address bar, you can just disable flash on Facebook, then switch it on for a video you do want to watch. Helps especially with older machines that get bogged down with all the rubbish.
have your say