Often, they can also show the much more important "well-paid video ad played" event. Video ads pay much better than other ads, and I believe that those videos are often ad-ridden - we just don't notice because your ad blocker takes care of that. (I know I've seen it a couple of times, but I don't know how frequent it is because I rarely make the mistake of visiting a news site on a browser without an ad blocker.)

+1 - duh. This is like asking people if they find the experience of stopping at a toll booth to be a pleasant part of the driving experience

Except it's a toll booth that you don't pay. It's part of some weird scam that depends on annoying you.

You pay with your wasted time and energy, and potential loss of focus as to what you came to the site to actually read.

Classic example of that "if a metric becomes the goal, that metric is no longer useful" quote. At least, I think that's a real quote.

In essence, Goodhart's Law: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

Having worked on video delivery, first play is not paid much attention. In most VPAID supported ads -one of the standards for video ad delivery- you have events fired at set intervals which are what is actually looked at when evaluating a placement value.

A placement that has high first play rate but a terrible 5sec event firing will just be worth nothing. In a programmatic world it means you'll get little to no bids for it or a default placement with payment in the fraction of cents per thousands.

Yes, but unlikely.

Its usually a deal with a 3rd-party that gives the guaranteed revenue based on views per week/month.

And the one publish ads gets absolutely no attention even though the numbers looks good. Who on the earth will watch a video stick at the corner of a news site page?

And yet everyone knows that those views are absolutely worthless. Who is paying for that? Who thinks this is a good use of their ad budget?