death to auto-playing video always and forever... CNN's site is especially bad about that, as I've experienced cases where I stop the "big" video at the top of the page and scroll down, only to have it start back up again when it moves to the sidebar.
Agreed, it is one of those irrational triggers for me where I go from fine to furious in maximum reaction time. Just imagining it happening gets my blood pressure up.
How about a chrome extension where you can put domains on a time-based blacklist for offenses against your sensibilities.
So if you go to CNN and they autoplay an ad, you can blacklist them for 1 week - Should you forget or carelessly click one of their links, this pops an interstitial page that reminds you of their offenses and gives you the opportunity to rescind your request for a page view.
Additionally there is an opt-in for you to report the offenses to a central service for public scrutiny/shaming... thoughts?
You probably want the "HTML5 Autoplay" Chrome extension which stops the overwhelming majority of these. It was a problem on Bloomberg as well as CNN, but now you'll see the window spin for a second and then stop.