Energy Cost of Advertisements in Mobile Games on the Android Platform

Advertisements (ads) are a common source of revenue for monetizing free mobile applications, but increase the energy consumption of a mobile device because the advertisement have to be fetched and displayed. In particular, the radio communication needed for the data transfer is power hungry and therefore advertisement sponsored free applications consume more energy than paid apps. This energy cost can be justified for Internet and social-applications but not for standalone games where always-on Internet connectivity is not necessarily required. In this paper, we analyze the energy consumed by mobile advertisements in an Android Phone. We measure the energy consumption by comparing the power usage of mobile phone games with and without advertisements. Our results show that advertisements in general consume significant amount of energy, but the consumption depends on how frequently advertisements are requested from the advertisement server(Ad Mob Server). In applications where advertisements are fetched frequently the energy consumed is higher, while in applications where advertisements are fetched rarely, it is lower. Moreover, we observe that the Ad Mob Server does not always send a new advertisement for each request but responds with a HTTP 304 (Resource Not Modified) leading to unnecessary usage of network and energy.