Affiliation:
1. University of California, Irvine, Irvine, CA, USA
Abstract
Online advertising (essentially display ads on websites) has proliferated in the last decade to the extent where it is now an integral part of the web. In this paper, we apply an in-depth and first-of-a-kind performance evaluation of web ads. Unlike prior efforts that rely primarily on adblockers, we perform a fine-grained analysis of the web browser's page loading process to demystify the performance cost of web ads. We aim to characterize the cost by every component of an ad, so the publisher, ad syndicate, and advertiser can improve the ad's performance with detailed guidance. For this purpose, we develop a tool, adPerf, for the Chrome browser that classifies page loading workloads into ad-related and main-content at the granularity of browser activities. Our evaluations show that online advertising entails more than 15% of browser page loading workload and approximately 88% of that is spent on JavaScript. On smartphones, this additional cost of ads is 7% lower as we observe mobile pages include fewer and well-optimized ads. We also track the sources and delivery chain of web ads and analyze performance considering the origin of the ad contents. We observe that 2 of the well-known third-party ad domains contribute to 35% of the ads performance cost and surprisingly, top news websites implicitly include unknown third-party ads which in some cases build up to more than 37% of the ads performance cost.
Funder
National Science Foundation
Publisher
Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
Subject
Computer Networks and Communications,Hardware and Architecture,Software
Reference4 articles.
1. The Chain of Implicit Trust: An Analysis of the Web Third-party Resources Loading
2. What-If Analysis of Page Load Time in Web Browsers Using Causal Profiling
3. adPerf
4. Xiao Sophia Wang , Aruna Balasubramanian , Arvind Krishnamurthy , and David Wetherall . 2013 . Demystifying Page Load Performance with WProf .. In 10th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation. 473--485 . Xiao Sophia Wang, Aruna Balasubramanian, Arvind Krishnamurthy, and David Wetherall. 2013. Demystifying Page Load Performance with WProf.. In 10th USENIX Symposium on Networked Systems Design and Implementation. 473--485.