Mitigating the true cost of advertisement-supported "free" mobile applications

The dominant, "ad-supported free application" model for consumer-oriented mobile computing is seemingly imperiled by the growing global adoption of metered data pricing plans by mobile operators. In this paper, we explore the opportunities for addressing this emerging conflict by enabling more intelligent ad delivery to such mobile devices. One especially promising path is leveraging the increasing availability of heterogeneous wireless access technologies (e.g., WiFi, femtocells) that offer less restrictive and more energy-efficient transport substrates for such data traffic. To understand the possibilities that exist, we first profile the advertisement traffic characteristics for some of the most popular advertisement-supported consumer applications, and then analyze the key features of mobile advertisement delivery. We then outline the principles of CAMEO, a middleware that uses predictive profiling of a user's {device, network and usage} context to anticipate the advertisements that need to be served, and then modulates their delivery mechanism to enable effective mobile advertising, but at considerably lower costs.