Energy is today the most critical environmental challenge. The amount of carbon emissions contributing to climate change is significantly influenced by both the production and consumption of energy. Measuring and reducing the energy consumption of services is a crucial step toward reducing adverse environmental effects caused by carbon emissions. Millions of websites rely on online advertisements to generate revenue, with most websites earning most or all of their revenues from ads. As a result, hundreds of billions of online ads are delivered daily to internet users to be rendered in their browsers. Both the delivery and rendering of each ad consume energy. This study investigates how much energy online ads use in the rendering process and offers a way for predicting it as part of rendering the ad. To the best of the authors' knowledge, this is the first study to calculate the energy usage of single advertisements in the rendering process. Our research further introduces different levels of consumption by which online ads can be classified based on energy efficiency. This classification will allow advertisers to add energy efficiency metrics and optimize campaigns towards consuming less possible.

翻译：能源是当今最严峻的环境挑战。导致气候变化的碳排放量在很大程度上受到能源生产和消费方式的影响。衡量并减少服务能耗是降低碳排放对生态环境不利影响的关键步骤。数百万网站依赖在线广告获取收入，其中大多数网站的全部或大部分收入来自广告。因此，每天有数千亿在线广告被投送至互联网用户的浏览器中呈现。每条广告的投送与呈现过程均会消耗能源。本研究探究了在线广告在渲染过程中的能耗量，并提出了一种在广告渲染期间预测其能耗的方法。据作者所知，这是首次在渲染过程中计算单条广告能耗的研究。此外，本研究引入了基于能效的在线广告分级标准，该分类体系将帮助广告商增加能效指标，优化广告活动以尽可能降低能耗。