  In the mobile app ecosystem, developers receive ad revenue by placing ads in
their apps and releasing them for free. While there is evidence that users do
not like ads, we do not know what are the aspects of ads that users dislike nor
if they dislike certain aspects of ads more than others. Therefore, in this
paper, we analyzed the different topics of ad related complaints from users. In
order to do this, we investigated app reviews that users gave for apps in the
app store that were about ads. We manually examined a random sample set of 400
ad reviews to identify ad complaint topics. We found that most ad complaints
were about user interface (UI) related topics and three topics were brought up
the most often: the frequency with which ads were displayed, the timing of when
ads were displayed, and the location of the displayed ads. Our results provide
actionable information to software developers regarding the aspects of ads that
are most likely to be complained about by users in their reviews.
