Publications

Uncovering the Hidden Data Costs of Mobile YouTube Video Ads

Emaan Atique*, Saad Sher Alam*, Harris Ahmad, Ihsan Ayyub Qazi, Zafar Ayyub Qazi
*Co-primary authors

Proceedings of the ACM Web Conference 2024 (WWW ‘24), Singapore, May 13–17, 2024
doi:10.1145/3589334.3645496

[PDF, explainer, code & data, Google Scholar]

Summary

Video platforms monetize via ads, but users also pay in mobile data — especially costly in developing regions. This paper presents the first independent empirical analysis of YouTube in-stream video ad data costs from the user perspective.

We built a crawl/stream pipeline and released a public corpus of 17,600 main videos and 46,600+ ads (~8,225 hours) across eight countries (four developing, four developed). Buffer-state analysis surfaces latent wastage:

• Users often still download 80–100% of a skippable ad’s data even after skipping (~31% of cases in developing regions, ~52.6% in developed regions).
• Mid-roll ads can force re-download of as much as ~71 seconds of main-video on average early in playback.
• Excess losses average about 6.7% of a 2GB mobile plan.

We discuss implications for platforms, ABR/ad-insertion policies, and affordability/inclusion.

Longer write-up: The hidden mobile data cost of YouTube video ads