The impact of the GDPR on content providers

Abstract

International audienceWe study the impact of the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on the advertising-supported online ecosystem. We focus on online content providers (such as news websites) and their users. We investigate whether restrictions on online tracking enforced by the regulation ultimately affect down-stream variables such as the quantity of content that websites offer to their visitorsand users’ engagement with such content. The results suggest that the GDPR reduced the number of third-party cookies and tracking responses in both US andEU websites. Furthermore, the enactment of the GDPR may have to some extent negatively affected traffic to EU websites, relative to US websites. However, the enactment does not seem to have negatively affected the amount of content that EU websites were able to publish (relative to US websites), or the degree ofaverage social media engagement and interaction with such content. Our analysisis ongoing, as data collection is continuing