Which website do you mean? There is no video on that Ars Technica article and the original article just has a standard YouTube video player with no autoplay.
Ars is playing a video automatically when I open the page.
Is that ad because I don’t see a video as part of the article.
How do you do that? I thought browsers don't play anything these days until you click on something.
I thought so too, but when I load that site there's a video playing right in the middle of it.
Maybe mobile browsers consider any scrolling as an interaction or something?
I believe the rule is not to play until clicked, for videos with sound. However, for videos that don't have sound, they are allowed to play at page-load. Also, due to this functionality, sites now have a sound-less video first play and then switch to a version with sound (faking "un-muting") when clicked. This does have the nice side-effect of eliminating those really annoying ads that used to play at full blast whenever I forgot to mute my laptop's sound. (Nonetheless, I still reflexively turn my laptop's speakers down to 5% when I am not using them after getting burned so many times in public.)