Analytics don’t provide context. My wife hates autoplay videos and those “blog posts” that now appear before all the recipes. Unfortunately turning off the video and having to scroll around trying to find the recipe is increasing her “engagement”.

Recipes can't be copyrighted and are basically undifferentiated. I suspect the resulting strategy is to try to hook you with the commentary, so that you like or relate to the author, making future visits more likely.

The relevant metrics would be things like returning visitors, not necessarily time on site or clicks on "mute".

The problem isn't so much that videos autoplay.

The problem is that there's no way for people to set it to "off" as an option, and that any time this option is suggested or implemented someone will see how they can override it, because "people don't really want to block the videos our our site".

I set up a whole separate style with Stylus to get rid of the autoplay videos on Serious Eats. Also fixed up their site in a couple other ways as well.

You can block autoplay on Firefox without having to use any extensions.

I have ADHD and discovering that setting was a godsend. It's definitely reduced the number of ublock origin rules I've had to create.

about:config

media.autoplay.enabled = false