When you say "video ads," are you referring to ads that play inside videos, like on youtube? I rarely watch videos, and have other privacy extensions installed, so have never seen that. If that is what you are referring to, it would be helpful if you would open an issue on the project page so that I can look into it.

As for the permissions you mentioned, that is the domain where the extension loads the list of blocking rules from. I did this so that I can update the blocking rules without the need to update the addon version. No tracking is being done, you can verify yourself by reading the source, which isn't all that large. I will update the description to explain this as well.

You need to enable the option to remove sponsored articles from the options page. Only the tracking prevention is enabled by default.