Even worse than the news videos themselves is the excite page. Above all the news stories there are always four videos—with no captions!!! WTF? Hey, Marge, come on in here. I discovered some more of them there movin’ pictures. Wake the kids!
Something else that’s really annoying is the growing prevalence of embedded videos on news and blog pages. I hate when you just want to click on something for a second and then get stuck waiting for a video to load.
They probably get extra advertising money for people forced to view the pre-story video ads (as opposed to page-embedded ones), so they ram it down our throats. Or it could be another case of Fancy Gadget Syndrome. There’s absolutely no design-oriented reason not to have a text version of all the video stories.
The great thing about text is that it’s probably being read by nude women as well.