https://www.wired.com/story/can-killing-cookies-save-journalism/
"In May 2018, as the European Union’s landmark privacy law, the General Data
Protection Regulation, went into effect, the main Dutch public broadcaster set
in motion a grand experiment. The leadership at Nederlandse Publieke
Omroep—essentially the BBC of the Netherlands—interpreted the law strictly,
deciding that visitors to any of its websites would now be prompted to opt in
or out of cookies, the tracking technology that enables personalized ads based
on someone’s browsing history. And, unlike with most companies, who assume that
anyone who skips past a privacy notice is OK with tracking, any NPO visitor who
clicked past the obtrusive consent screen without making a choice would be
opted out by default.
The results weren’t terribly surprising: 90 percent of users opted out.
Here is where the ad tech industry would have predicted calamity. A study
performed by Google last year, for example, concluded that disabling cookies
reduced publisher revenue by more than 50 percent. (Research by an independent
team of economists, however, pegged the cookie premium at only 4 percent.
Needless to say, there were methodological differences.) If the Google study
was right, then NPO should have been heading for financial disaster. The
opposite turned out to be true. Instead, the company found that ads served to
users who opted out of cookies were bringing in as much or more money as ads
served to users who opted in. The results were so strong that as of January
2020, NPO simply got rid of advertising cookies altogether. And rather than
decline, its digital revenue is dramatically up, even after the economic shock
of the coronavirus pandemic.
This makes NPO a particularly powerful entrant into a long-running debate over
the value of targeted advertising. Ad tech companies, a category dominated by
Google and Facebook but which teems with other players, argue that
microtargeting is better for everyone: users like “relevant” ads, advertisers
like being able to reach potential customers more precisely, and publishers get
paid more for ads with a higher click rate. A growing body of evidence,
however, calls each of these premises into question. The significance of the
debate goes far beyond internet privacy, implicating the viability of
journalism and, by extension, the health of democracy."
Via Kevin O'Brien, who wrote "Web sites don’t really
need to invade your
privacy."
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
