Comparison of in-app ads traffic in different ad networks

Mobile advertising using in-app ads has increased in popularity along with the substantial number of current free mobile applications and games in the app stores. This relatively new type of advertising has raised several concerns during the past few years, such as the battery consumption that it entails and the network traffic overhead that it consumes to download the ads. While several efforts revealed key observations regarding ads-related energy and bandwidth consumption, they did not compare these two types of consumptions among different ad networks. Unlike some previous work that just mentioned the ad networks associated with the tested apps, our work evaluates bandwidth and energy consumption and compares them among several popular ad networks that support ads for Android applications. The experimental procedure followed in this study demonstrated that resource consumption varies significantly among networks based on our statistical tests. In addition, this study highlights a common behavior when fetching ads, where ads are fetched at the beginning of app runtime and displayed throughout the application session.