To the extent that your mobile data usage allowance is a cost issue, it is largely because usage allowances are matched to usage, in most cases. Even "unlimited" usage plans are not actually truly unlimited; throttling of speed happens at some point.
And to to a huge extent, the data people consumer on their mobile devices is advertising. So to some extent, users pay to receive advertising as they need data allowances about double what their actual intended content requires.
It has been clear for perhaps half a decade that video and video advertising now represent a considerable amount of the data people consume on mobile or fixed internet connections, with estimates running from 10 percent to 50 percent of total data consumption to perhaps 18 percent to 79 percent.
In 2014, as much as 38 percent of all video content viewed online consisted of video advertising, according to Statista.
Some issues and subjects do not get researched or investigated because the sunlight does not reflect too well on private interests. And that can hold true for virtually any entity--public or private, big or small--any bureau of government, churches, social organizations, political parties or candidates, companies or charities.
To illustrate, there is very little research on the amount of total data consumption on smartphones or other devices that consists entirely of advertising. The reasons are not difficult to fathom: it arguably reflects poorly on the web experience.
After all, rare is the citizen or consumer who professes to enjoy advertising exposure. People tolerate it because they receive benefits (lower cost or free content, generally). But there also are costs when video advertising data represents a large percentage of data consumption, as most consumers pay for data consumption, and generally in some way related to total consumption.
That is not to denigrate the value of advertising in supporting user access to valuable applications, services and content. Advertising support always has been an important revenue model supporting content delivery, for example.
Still, it is hard to find data on what percentage of any customer’s total data consumption consists of advertising. But the few studies you might be able to find suggest that more than half of data consumption related to viewing of news sites consists of advertising. In one test, 55 percent of total data consumption was advertising, and much of that was driven by use of video.
That is especially the case now that consumers watch so much video (video represents as much as 80 percent of total mobile data consumption).
Also, all that video consumption drives online and mobile video advertising volume. Up to 90 percent of advertisers use video for their advertising, some estimate. By some estimates, the average person is now estimated to encounter between 6,000 to 10,000 ads every single day, and a huge percentage of those ads will use full-motion video.
All that explains the usage of ad blocking apps since about 2010, efforts by ad-supported apps to disable or prevent ad blocking, and the rise of web browsers with control over ad insertion.
An analysis of the 200 most popular news sites (as ranked by Alexa) in 2015 showed that Mozilla Firefox Tracking Protection lead to 39 percent reduction in data usage and 44 percent median reduction in page load time, according to a study sponsored by Mozilla.
The New York Times once found that ad blockers reduced data consumption and sped up load time by more than half on 50 news sites, including their own.
Journalists concluded that "visiting the home page of Boston.com (the site with most ad data in the study) every day for a month would cost the equivalent of about $9.50 in data usage just for the ads".[3
But the volume of data consumption does affect connectivity provider business models in direct fashion, as it requires the supply of ever-greater capacity, mostly for the same rates historically charged--or lower. At the same time, the benefit of advertising--including users and consumers--does shift almost entirely to application providers.
But you will not find much research on that issue. It simply does not benefit many powerful interests in the content business, including connectivity providers who also own key content assets and ad-driven revenue models.
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