It’s crazy. Even with an adblocker you are subjected to a crazy amount of ads or hostile design. With ads, it’s just a free for all on your attention.
I used to love tech ads. I'd inspect every ad in BYTE, Creative Computing, etc. I'd even buy Computer Shopper, a massive catalog interrupted by some articles, just for the ads.
Ads can be useful, informative, and engaging. I wouldn't mind that.
Some math with conservative estimates:
* power consumption of mobile processor: 5W
* daily ad use: 1 hour (assume it's 100% cpu for the entire time)
* smartphone users: 7.8 billion (world population)
Total yearly electricity consumption given the above: 2.8 TWh
World electricity consumption: 23,921 TWh in 2019
I don't think you can actually put a number on this waste.
Feel free to put up an estimate then.
>I don't think you can actually put a number on this waste.
Well that just makes it clear you're only interested in your feelings/vibes as opposed to anything objective.
So, even if advertising was technically neutral (which is clearly not the case), it would still be an ecological cataclysm.
One would even argue that the whole climate emergency is created by our advertise/consume culture.
To give a really simple upper limit: 36.8 billion tonnes per year. Because that's the current total global CO2 emissions per year. And we can be pretty sure that ads are less than that, or at least not more.
I agree with your assessment of the grandparent comment.
Pulling an "estimate" out of your ass isn't exactly any more objective than admitting that attempting to estimate it is futile.
"I know that I know nothing" and all that.
Where's the outrage from the colossal carbon footprint of the overarching, advertising-based economy? Does anyone have any idea what the electrical costs or carbon footprint per dollar of ad revenue is? It surely must be one of the lowest returns per environmental impact in the entire spectrum of capitalism. Sure, complain about cryptocurrency "setting the earth on fire," but Google gets a free pass for much the same thing to make their trillions?
I can hear the fans on my Windows machine spin up, and I know it's Windows Update time.
Although this study doesn't discuss C02 emissions, it does discuss energy use and the potential impact of internet advertising.
Unfortunately, it only discusses the impact on client-side devices, the energy consumption of hardware used to serve advertisements (networking, servers) is left to a future study.
>Strikingly, uBlock Origin has the potential to save the average global Internet user more than 100 h annually.
>So, for example, the 1.35 × 1010 kWh saved globally for using uBlock Origin is equivalent to more than 1.0% of the electricity generated per year from coal in the United States, which is responsible for the premature deaths of about 52,000 American every year from air pollution [43,44].
>Globally, the results with the most efficient open source ad blocker tested, uBlock Origin, would be even more substantial: ad blocking would save consumers more than $1.8 billion/year.