Experimental study of energy and bandwidth costs of web advertisements on smartphones

With the rapid advancements in mobile devices, users have become more attached to them than ever. This rapid growth, combined with millions of applications (apps), makse smartphones a favourite means of communication among users. In general, the available contents on smartphones, apps and the web, come in two versions: (i) free contents that are monetized via advertisements (ads); and (ii) paid contents that are monetized by user subscription fees. However, the resources, namely, energy, bandwidth, and processing power, on-board are limited, and the existence of ads in websites and free apps can significantly increase the usage of these resources. Therefore, in this paper, we describe an approach that enables the separation of web contents in a number of websites. Having done so, the energy cost due to downloading, rendering, and displaying web ads over Wi-Fi and 3G networks is evaluated. That is, how much energy web ads contribute to the total consumed energy when a user accesses the web. Furthermore, the bandwidth consumed by web ads in a number of well-known websites is also evaluated. The high cost of ads on smartphones must be considered by the designers and vendors of apps.