(Newswire.net — June 12, 2015) — For quite some time now, video content has been a must-have if you run a respective business website. The theory is that visitors do not have time to read text and that they would rather watch a movie clip. If the video is done professionally, the chances your message will reach your target market should increase.
However, according to psychologist Liraz Margalit Ph.D., the future may not be that bright in favor of video over text. Margalit analyzed online customer behavior for a certain company, and discovered people were usually hitting the pause button on the video without watching it.
“When a visitor comes to a website planning to read the news but sound and video suddenly jump out at them, the effect is jarring. It makes readers feel they have lost control,” Margalit wrote in her article on ‘The Psychology of Web Browsing” published in the Psychology Today web magazine.
“It’s important for businesses to understand that, when customers visit their websites, the expectation factor is also very much at play,” Margalit wrote, implying that if visitors clicked on something to read it, they probably prefer to read it rather than watch a video.
Margalit’s findings are in connection to videos that were set to auto-play when a certain page opens. Videos present on the site that are only played when clicked on are obviously still beneficial and don’t see the same effect.
The tendency to immediately pause an autoplay video, Margalit explained has to do with our natural tendency as humans to keep content under our control. If a video starts without our permission, we feel subconsciously attacked and our natural reaction is to defend ourselves by regaining control, hence the frenzy to hit the pause button.
Things, however, could get much worse for your business if there is no pause or stop button displayed on the video, because we tend to immediately close those webpages, disregarding the content and leave with a sense of future subconscious blockage towards webpage content.
According to online content psychoanalyst Liraz Margalit, automatic videos are not the “only online situations that promote stress responses.” Long scrolling pages tend to have the same effect on visitors.
“I’ve witnessed visitors start scrolling along a page and suddenly realize they don’t know where they are anymore. It’s a thoroughly modern phenomenon but it evokes the same fear triggers that our ancestors felt when they were in a foreign environment and suddenly didn’t know how far they were from home,” Margalit wrote.
For such deep-rooted behavior, Margalit ‘blames’ our prehistoric ancestors who were ‘using trail markers in order to not get lost,’ because that could mean life threatening danger. Today, even though the threats have become less obvious and sometimes are not even real, if our sub-consciousness identifies them as such, “our body will generate the same autonomic reactions in response to perceived or imagined threats,” Margalit wrote in article.
“The need for control is rooted deeply within us and has a subconscious impact on our online behavior too,” she explained.