According to WSJ [1] the issue was that the ads were autoplaying with sound on. Just auto playing by itself isn't considered intrusive by the industry.
Some of us don't want to spring for unlimited data plans and get rather frustrated when reading textual news incurs the charges associated with streaming video. Bandwidth is not boundless for everyone.
> intrusive behavior not considered intrusive by those with incentives to be intrusive
Autoplay is evil everywhere unless I enable it explicitly.