I ship a 0.91 MB media player client called RKMovies . The reason it is that small is not some trick. It is because it does not ship ad networks, tracking, or a backend that phones home. I keep getting asked why I bothered. This post is the answer: ad-supported players cost real money and real battery, and the part nobody budgets for is data.

What the research says

There is a paper from the ACM Web Conference 2024 ("Uncovering the Hidden Data Costs of Mobile YouTube Video Ads", LUMS Lahore) that measured over 46,000 ads and found two things that surprised me.

First, ads account for 13.2% of total data if you skip every ad, and up to 28% if you watch them. That is not the video. That is overhead.

Second, the player wastes the main video buffer. When a mid-roll ad starts, the player discards the buffered main-video content to prioritize the ad, then re-downloads the main video after the ad ends. So you pay twice for the same megabytes.…