User blog comment:Brandon Rhea/The Success and Future of Modernization/@comment-24285282-20180128063911/@comment-20644-20180128180024

Just to be clear, since you mentioned audio, Featured Videos are not auto-audio. They autoplay muted.

So far we have not seen a problematic impact on average page load times for pages that have a Featured Video, due in no small part to the fact that pages with Featured Video have even fewer ads on them than pages without Featured Video. Though the impact on mobile users is certainly something we continue to think about and experiment with.

In regards to the video's placement, we tested a number of possibilities a year ago and this is the placement that received the most engagement from visitors. Additionally, an "above the fold" placement (meaning, visible before the first scroll) is the only placement that meets the threshold of what advertisers call "viewability," a key metric in today's ad world.

If videos were at the bottom of the page, or lower in general, the preroll ads in front of them would be of significantly lower value and we would have to re-introduce some of the lower-performing ads on the page. As a result, page performance would suffer.