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 exploratory 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 analysis explicitly acknowledges the ordinal nature of these ratings and the experiment’s repeated-measures structure. The per-sample mean ratings were correlated with the objective loudness differences (R = 0.89), and exploratory analyses of variance were carried out within listener groups. The association between subjective and objective assessments was weaker among listeners declaring low familiarity with sound processing, and more markedly, among listeners reporting hearing problems; given the small, self-declared subgroups, these group-level observations are presented as exploratory. 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 most Internet services worldwide.