New Autoplay Embed for Media

We pay a lot of attention to the media at Coub. When they use coubs on their sites they often send us feedback. One thing we’ve learned from coubs in media is that autoplays greatly increase audience engagement. We already know this from Facebook: autoplays generally have far more visible engagement than embeds that have to be clicked on. In short, people often won’t click play if they don’t have to.

With that in mind, we’ve made some big changes to the coub embed.

Now, when you click embed on a coub, you’ll see the Auto Start button. If you make your embed autoplay, it’ll be automatically muted, because an autoplay with sound would be highly annoying in most cases. We’ve been able to make coubs autoplay for a long time already, but now, if you want sound, you can just click anywhere on the coub. See?

Another nice change is how the embed interacts with your browser. The embedded coub will only load and play when it’s in your viewport, so there’s no stress placed on your browser, no matter how many embeds you’re using.

The new embed works perfectly for media. We all know that autoplays are more engaging for audiences. And the convenience of clicking anywhere on the embed for sound makes the experience that much more smooth.

There’s some great news for Tumblr users too. Coubs now autoplay in the dash. So you’ve got all the potential virality of GIFs, but with sharper image resolution and audio.