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.

As a popular choice for video and entertainment streaming, YouTube hosts a large audience, including children, who form a growing proportion of its users. Despite separate "made for kids" labelling and stricter moderation of these videos, inappropriate advertising remains a concern as it threatens the safety of YouTube for young viewers. This paper is the first comparative measurement study that explores how advertisement exposure and content vary across child-oriented videos on YouTube. We do this by conducting a cross-regional advertisement analysis on highly viewed "made for kids" labelled content across a total of ten countries with varying regulation. A second front of comparison is carried out between ad patterns on unlabelled and labelled child-oriented videos. Our analysis reveals that the safety of a child's YouTube experience is shaped significantly by their external environment. There also appears to be lax enforcement of YouTube ad and child protection policies, indicated by the presence of unlabelled child-oriented content with weak ad regulation. We discuss the implications of inappropriate exposure on children and suggest policy and implementation measures to mitigate this threat.

Public service websites act as official gateways to services provided by governments. Many of these websites are essential for citizens to receive reliable information and online government services. However, the lack of affordability of mobile broadband services in many developing countries and the rising complexity of websites create barriers for citizens in accessing these government websites. This paper presents the first large-scale analysis of the affordability of public service websites in developing countries. We do this by collecting a corpus of 1900 public service websites, including public websites from nine developing countries and for comparison websites from nine developed countries. Our investigation is driven by website complexity analysis as well as evaluation through a recently proposed affordability index. Our analysis reveals that, in general, public service websites in developing countries do not meet the affordability target set by the UN’s Broadband Commission. However, we show that several countries can be brought within or closer to the affordability target by implementing webpage optimizations to reduce page sizes. We also discuss policy interventions that can help make access to public service website more affordable.

Web Light is a transcoding service introduced by Google to show lighter and faster webpages to users searching on slow mobile clients. The service detects slow clients (e.g., users on 2G) and tries to convert webpages on the fly into a version optimized for these clients. Web Light claims to significantly reduce page load times, save user data, and substantially increase traffic to such webpages. However, there are several concerns around this service, including, its effectiveness in, preserving relevant content on a page, showing third-party advertisements, improving user performance as well as privacy concerns for users and publishers.