Exploring the effects of ad schemes on the performance cost of mobile phones

Abstract

Advertising is an important revenue source for mobile app development, especially for free apps. However, ads also carry costs to users. Displaying ads can interfere user experience, and lead to less user retention and reduced earnings ultimately. Although there are recent studies devoted to directly mitigating ad costs, for example, by reducing the battery or memory consumed, comprehensive analysis on ad embedded schemes (e.g., ad sizes and ad providers) has rarely been conducted. In this paper, we focus on analyzing three types of performance cost, i.e., cost of memory/CPU, traffic, and battery. We explore 12 ad schemes used in 104 popular Android apps and compare their performance consumption. We show that the performance costs of the ad schemes we analyzed are significantly different. We also summarize the ad schemes that would generate low resource cost to users. Our summary is endorsed by 37 experienced app developers we surveyed.