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This scoping review synthesizes existing literature on measuring the energy and carbon footprint of web tracking and advertising, addressing the fragmented nature of current scholarship. By analyzing 46 articles and narrowing down to 15 key studies, the authors identify five distinct methodological approaches: ad blocking, controlled environment, replaying ads, traffic flow analysis, and literature-derived estimation. The findings lay a crucial groundwork for more consistent and comprehensive environmental accounting in the ad tech ecosystem, highlighting the need for standardized approaches in this emerging field.
The review reveals five distinct methods for quantifying the carbon footprint of web advertising, paving the way for more rigorous environmental accountability in digital marketing.
The environmental impact of web tracking and advertising is increasingly receiving attention as the ICT sector's carbon footprint keeps rising. Yet the scholarship addressing this question remains scattered across disciplines and inconsistent in its terminology. This paper presents a scoping review of the literature on methods for measuring the energy and carbon footprint of web tracking and advertising. From an initial pool of 46 articles identified through a structured title-based search on Google Scholar, we arrived at a final corpus of 15 papers, from which we identified five distinct methodological approaches: ad blocking, controlled environment, replaying ads, traffic flow analysis, and literature-derived estimation. This review provides a structured overview of the current methodological landscape and a foundation for more comprehensive environmental accounting of the ad tech ecosystem.
