Uncovering the Hidden Data Costs of Mobile YouTube Video Ads

Popular video streaming platforms attract a large number of global marketers who use the platform to advertise their services. While benefiting platforms and advertisers, users are burdened with the costs of advertisements. Users not only pay for these ads with their invested time and personal information, but also through a substantial amount of data translating into direct financial cost. The financial cost becomes even more pronounced in developing countries, where the cost of mobile broadband can be disproportionately high relative to average income levels. In this paper, we perform the first independent and empirical analysis of the data costs of mobile video ads on YouTube, the most popular video platform, from the users' perspective. To do so, we collect and analyze a data set of over 46,000 YouTube video ads. We find that streaming video ads have multiplelatent andavoidable sources of data wastage, which can lead to excessive data consumption by users. We also conduct an affordability analysis to quantify the overall impact of data wastage and reveal the specific data costs per country associated with these losses. Our findings highlight the need for video platform providers, such as YouTube, to minimize data wastage linked to ads, to make their services more affordable and inclusive.