adPerf

Monetizing websites and web apps through online advertising is widespread in the web ecosystem, creating a billion-dollar market. This has led to the emergence of a vast network of tertiary ad providers and ad syndication to facilitate this growing market. Nowadays, the online advertising ecosystem forces publishers to integrate ads from these third-party domains. On the one hand, this raises several privacy and security concerns that are actively being studied in recent years. On the other hand, the ability of today's browsers to load dynamic web pages with complex animations and Javascript has also transformed online advertising. This can have a significant impact on webpage performance. The latter is a critical metric for optimization since it ultimately impacts user satisfaction. Unfortunately, there are limited literature studies on understanding the performance impacts of online advertising which we argue is as important as privacy and security. 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 on 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 since 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.

What Web Ads, Blurbs and Introductions Tell Potential Dictionary Buyers about Users, User Needs and Lexicographic Functions

The present article deals with an investigation aimed at establishing the extent to which existing dictionaries provide potential dictionary buyers/borrowers with clear, unmistakable and easily understandable information about user need situations that might prompt consultation of the dictionary in question. The investigation analyses four monolingual English phrasal verbs dictionaries and five monolingual English specialised dictionaries. The primary sources of such information are identified as back cover blurbs of dictionaries, introductions to dictionaries and web ads for dictionaries. In the analysis, statements about user need situations extracted from these information sources are first classified as clear vs. unclear statements. The clear statements are then classified under the lexicographic function to which they are related. The results of the analysis disconfirm the hypothesis that the more well-defined and constrained the intended user group or groups for a given dictionary are, the more likely it is that the sources of information will provide the potential dictionary buyer/borrower with clear, unmistakable and easily understandable information about lexicographic function(s).

Political Communication in Context: A Genre-Based Approach

Research on genres in political communication has been under scrutiny during the last few decades. The papers collected in the reviewed volume present a collection of the existing theories and approaches to the modern research tradition on political communication. They cover both theory- and data-driven studies, which vary in their material from the traditional official documents to the recent ones such as blogs and web ads. All in all, the volume demonstrates a broad range of interests and conducted research, and the vast scope of investigations, which fill in the gap that existed in the field.

Sounds of Web Advertising

Sound seems to be a neglected issue in the study of web ads. Web advertising is predominantly regarded as visual phenomena–commercial messages, as for instance banner ads that we watch, read, and eventually click on–but only rarely as something that we listen to. The present chapter presents an overview of the auditory dimensions in web advertising: Which kinds of sounds do we hear in web ads? What are the conditions and functions of sound in web ads? Moreover, the chapter proposes a theoretical framework in order to analyse the communicative functions of sound in web advertising. The main argument is that an understanding of the auditory dimensions in web advertising must include a reflection on the hypertextual settings of the web ad as well as a perspective on how users engage with web content.