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Many internet users are shown thousands of adverts a day, and all those ads use a huge amount of energy, say researchers.

鈥淥nline advertising consumes more than we think, comparable to a small country,鈥� says at the UC3M-Santander Big Data Institute in Spain.

Callejo and her colleagues worked with Cavai, an advertising tech company based in Norway, to develop CarbonTag, a system to help account for energy use and any associated greenhouse gas emissions in this sector. It adds a small piece of code to each ad that collects data for calculating the energy consumption required by the user鈥檚 device and software that measures clicks and other aspects of the ad鈥檚 performance.

The data then goes to a remote computer server that uses CarbonTag鈥檚 AI-powered system to estimate each ad鈥檚 energy consumption. CarbonTag could someday also provide an energy rating and label that could be displayed alongside ads.

To train the AI, the researchers collected 25,000 digital ads through automated browsing of websites, along with 598 ads from the online browsing sessions of researchers鈥� friends and colleagues.

The median energy consumption per ad ranged from 0.3 milliwatt-hours on a Windows laptop to 8 milliwatt-hours on a Windows desktop. Five ads would use the energy equivalent of turning on a small light for 1 minute, says Callejo.

Based on between 6000 and 10,000 online ads being shown each day to 5 billion internet users, the study calculated that the energy used by online advertising worldwide could be equivalent to Luxembourg鈥檚 electricity consumption at 6.5 billion kilowatt-hours each year, or possibly as much as Sweden鈥檚 131 billion kilowatt-hours.

However, the 5 billion figure counts anyone who has used the internet in a three month period, and the assumption that those users see thousands of ads per day is 鈥渄efinitely too high as the global average鈥�, says at the University of Bristol in the UK. He also points out that the study鈥檚 estimates are based on measurements with computers, whereas most people surf the internet using less energy intensive phones.

The CarbonTag researchers plan to collect phone-related data in the future. But they pointed out that CarbonTag is also underestimating energy consumption because it doesn鈥檛 measure the network-related energy associated with hosting and delivering ads from data centres. 鈥淭he network part should be one to two orders of magnitude more,鈥� says at Cavai.

Finding a better measure of how much energy online ads use is important work, says at Uppsala University in Sweden. 鈥淕etting a sense of that scale tells us how much attention we should put on [ad tech] versus other things, so we know where to make the most improvement for the energy efficiency of IT systems,鈥� he says.

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