Comment by xp84
5 months ago
> there's no honest reason to require a consent form to let you read an article.
Respectfully, this is untrue. The article is there because of the ads that pay the bills. Without ads there is no article and no site. Without consent, under these laws, the ads can only be useless ads that no advertiser wants to pay for, which means they either can't sell the ad space at all, or have to sell it for $0.0001 CPM hoping that like, Coca Cola will want to just remind the readers that Coke exists and not care too much if anyone even clicks it.
> Without consent, under these laws, the ads can only be useless ads that no advertiser wants to pay for, which means they either can't sell the ad space at all, or have to sell it for $0.0001 CPM hoping that like, Coca Cola will want to just remind the readers that Coke exists and not care too much if anyone even clicks it.
When behavioral targeted advertising was new, it vastly outperformed previous ad networks which used a spray-and-pray approach and paid by impressions. In the years (decades?) since, the payouts for behavioral targeted advertising have dropped significantly. "Untargeted" ads on the other hand have mostly vanished simply because the ad networks that used them have moved on to behavioral ads where they had to compete with mass data harvesters like Alphabet and Meta, mostly unsuccessfully.
Behavioral targeted advertising also doesn't live up to its promise for consumers. Nowadays most actual ads people get are either trying to sell products they already purchased or outright fraud - the rest is the same generic drivel that you would expect without targeted advertising. The reduction in tracking surface from sites that don't require these ads to operate (e.g. sites that previously fed into networks like Google's via unrelated services that can now no longer be legally used for that purpose and require opt-in) also means the targeting will become increasingly worse.
The GDPR does allow for making behavioral ads conditional to accessing content, by the way. But it requires providing the user with the option to instead pay for the content. The problem a lot of companies like Meta run into is that it also requires the price to be proportionate to the lost advertising revenue - Meta is infamous for having priced its "ad-free" tier orders of magnitude higher than their actual value of an individual user.
That said, what is killing this kind of site isn't users deciding not to give away their data but services like Google scraping their content and pre-empting user traffic to their websites entirely - first via news feeds and search summaries and now via "AI enhanced search". The ad-driven business model is dying and has been dying for a long time, the GDPR just puts limits on what can replace it. Google wasn't paying sites because it wanted to sell ads, Google was paying sites because it needed access to their users' data.