Numbers travel fast in the ad-carbon conversation, and they often arrive without provenance — a percentage in a deck, a tonnage in a headline, no link back to who measured it or what it covers. For a field this young, that is a problem: an agency citing a figure in a client’s CSRD report needs to know exactly what stands behind it.
So we publish ours. Below is every number on our homepage, the organisation that produced it, and the scope it genuinely covers — including where the figure is narrower than a headline might suggest.
The six numbers, and where they come from
6 hours 38 minutes a day — time spent online per internet user. Source: GWI, reported in DataReportal’s Global Digital Report 2025 (February 2025), where it appears as “Internet (total)” daily time for internet users aged 16+. A global, self-reported average across all devices. It measures time online specifically, not every media format — the honest version of how much of the day runs through connected screens.
52% have installed or used an ad blocker. Source: YouGov (January 2024), reported by eMarketer, across 48 global markets. Worth separating from the narrower “use one regularly” figure (GWI puts that nearer one-third) — more than half of consumers have reached for ad blocking at some point.
7.2 million tonnes of CO₂ a year — from digital display advertising and streaming. Source: Scope3, in the ANA’s Programmatic Media Supply Chain analysis (2023), benchmarked against the US open-web display market. Not the footprint of all advertising everywhere — a defined, measured slice, which is why it is citable.
670 g CO₂ per 1,000 display impressions — the industry average. Source: Ebiquity and Scope3, The Hidden Cost of Digital Advertising — drawn from 116 billion impressions across 43 advertisers and 11 markets. A display-format average; video runs higher. This is the benchmark our own per-impression measurement is built to improve on.
$26.8 billion in open-web programmatic spend that could be more effectively allocated. Source: the ANA’s Programmatic Transparency Benchmark (Q3 2025) — roughly 21.8% of a ~$123 billion open-web market. It is a reallocation opportunity across the supply chain (transaction costs, non-viewable inventory, made-for-advertising sites and more), not a single line of pure waste.
82% of the industry call a lack of education a key obstacle to sustainability progress — and 81% say the same of missing industry standards. Source: IAB Europe, State of Readiness: Sustainability in Digital Advertising (2025). The appetite to measure is there; the blockers are infrastructure and clarity — the gap measurement tools exist to close.
Where our own numbers come from
The six figures above are industry context — other people’s research, cited as such. Lumotraq’s own numbers are different: the per-impression ad-carbon and water figures we report are measured from real ad delivery, combined with live per-country grid intensity rather than annual averages. How that calculation works, end to end, is documented on our methodology page; how it maps to the frameworks auditors recognise — GMSF, the GHG Protocol, IAB Tech Lab — is set out in frameworks and standards. We don’t restate those here; this page is only about the homepage figures and their provenance.