GDPR may mean less money for websites, report says

A working paper from three academics puts forward the notion that websites are seeing less revenue because of the EU’s General Data Protection Rule (GDPR), MIT Technology Review reports. 

The authors, from Northwestern University, Boston University and the University of Colorado at Boulder studied data from Adobe Analytics and looked at numbers before and after GDPR in 2018 with numbers from same dates in 2017.

GDPR took effect in spring of last year. Under GDPR, people need to provide permission to be tracked.

The data involved 1,500 online companies (including 128 of the biggest 1,000 worldwide sites) and included content sites that profit from page views and e-commerce sites that profit through sales.

The data showed that recorded page views and revenue dropped by about 10 percent for EU users, amounting to around $8,000 less weekly revenue for the median site.

The number is most likely not as high as 10 percent, however, according to MIT Technology Review. Data from Adobe Analytics is also affected by GDPR, “meaning that just as fewer people are sharing data with other websites since May 2018, fewer are sharing data with Adobe Analytics,” according to MIT Technology Review.

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