Objective and Subjective Assessment of the Loudness of Internet Advertisements

Loudness discrepancies between Internet advertisements and the program material they accompany affect user comfort, yet, unlike broadcast television, streaming services are subject to few binding loudness regulations. This article presents a combined objective and subjective study of the loudness of Internet advertisements. Objective loudness was measured in LUFS units according to Recommendation ITU-R BS.1770-4 using an application built on the pyloudnorm package and validated against the ITU-R BS.2217-2 compliance material. Fifteen advertisement–program pairs collected from popular Polish streaming and video-on-demand services were analyzed. In the subjective experiment, thirty listeners compared the loudness of each advertisement with that of the accompanying program material using a bounded, bipolar category-rating scale administered through the webMUSHRA framework; the ordinal character of such ratings is explicitly acknowledged in the analysis. The ratings were examined with one-way analysis of variance and Tukey post hoc tests within listener groups, and the per-sample mean ratings were correlated with the objective loudness differences. Subjective ratings correlated strongly with objective LUFS differences, and rating consistency decreased with lower listener expertise in audio processing and with self-reported hearing problems. The results document the extent to which loudness recommendations are exceeded in Internet advertising and provide a reusable methodology for monitoring compliance. Although the problem is illustrated with examples drawn from Polish services, the authors' exploratory checks of foreign platforms indicate that a similar situation prevails across many Internet services worldwide.