??Western European publishers found a way to keep high cookie consent rates. Will Eastern Europe follow?

Editor’s note: This column is published in partnership with FatChilli, The Fix’s product partners and the team behind our website. You can learn more about our cooperation here.

Consent messages, the so-called cookie banners, had been around for several years before they became mandatory for all publishers offering services to visitors from the European Union as a result of GDPR going into effect. Even if the initial discussions predicting UX hell unleashed after implementing cookie banners were partly confirmed, today we can say that website visitors have gotten used to them. After all, visitors often have no choice and must select an option in order to access the content, which is in most cases forbidden, therefore it makes a lot of publishers non-compliant. 

Another business challenge is the percentage of readers rejecting cookies for marketing & analytical purposes.

How should publishers deal with visitors browsing their, often expensively produced, content without the ability to track them properly and monetise them effectively? 

Trends applied by the Western European publishers show us how to ensure a high cookie consent rate and thus save a significant part of the revenue from personalised advertising. This could be a revenue-saving way out of uncertainty for advertising-first publishers.

Disclaimer: The article is an assessment of the current situation, we do not provide legal advice in it. Any changes in the privacy strategy or CMP in your organisation should be cleared with your law department or a local regulator.

What are publishers trying to achieve?

In recent years, publishers have been trying to ensure that visitors give consent to the use of cookies. Product departments burn expensive analytical hours to investigate methods and models that would ensure the highest possible cookie consent rate and thus the lowest possible impact on revenue from targeted advertising. However, options of modifying layouts, colours and buttons priority have been significantly reduced by the new regulations. Consent banner layout has become more standardised.

In FatChilli’s research, these requirements were pointed out by publishers as the most limiting:

• The cookie bar must not occupy more than the space necessary, it should not cover a larger area of the viewport than is needed for informed selection 
• The cookie banner cannot serve as a cookie wall. Forcing choice and denying access to content is not allowed

These requirements lead to low consent rates and numbers of visitors who disagree, caused by the equivalence of the possibilities, simplifying a choice and even improved user experience for non-tracked visitors

Other problems publishers are experiencing are

• Rising bounce rates on the landing page after deploying a Consent Management Platform (CMP)
• Choosing a suboptimal CMP negatively affecting website performance 

The first three problems can be solved by implementing a Cookie Paywall, or the so-called PUR model, which we also often recommend to our customers.

The key to success is subscription

Following a precedent set by the Austrian regulator, websites with digital subscription have found a way to save a large portion of their advertising revenue while providing the reader with a fair no-tracking alternative. This model is well settled in Austrian, French and German markets.  

// Implement an open-source subscription platform for readers engagement and monetisation, REMP. Book your demo call at digitalDNA@fatchillimedia.com //

Long story short, if the publisher provides the visitor with an alternative access to the content without tracking for a fair price, the cookie banner can be used in the form of a Cookie wall, preventing access to the content and thus limiting the offer to the visitor to only 2 options is on the table: “consent or pay.”

For a clearer demonstration, let’s see examples:

Will Eastern Europe follow the West?

They are starting to experiment with a cookie paywall solution in Eastern Europe. By opening these discussions and learning from the best practices applied in Western Europe, it is only a matter of time for the model to penetrate smaller markets as well. Revenue recovered and a fair alternative provided to visitors is what truly matters. 

Is the Cookie Paywall model valid, legal and sustainable in the long run?

EU member countries have different national legislations, and we recommend consulting on its validity with the experts and regulators in your country. Due to its wide adoption by the key players in Western Europe, the so-called PUR model could be part of the guidelines of regulators in Eastern European countries in the future.

The NYOB organisation, a long-time critic of publishers’ approach to privacy protection on the internet, filed an official complaint against the “Consent or Pay” concept. If the regulator agrees with the complaint the former precedents PUR model is built upon may lose their importance

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