What does EU GDPR means for Adsense?

Question about GDPR and Adsense.

[hwint]

Question: What does EU GDPR means for Adsense?

Most of the Adsense income is from interest based ads. Will this be affected by the EU GDPR?
I'm concerned because today with the latest update for my Android Phone, I got asked for permission related to interest based ads. (Maybe it is because I did disable it before. This is to see the normal ads on my pages with Adsense. But I'm still concerned.)

[MayankParmar]

But but what if a rival complains to EU? Probably the best way to nuke a site.

[QuaterPan]

But but what if a rival complains to EU? Probably the best way to nuke a site.

Yes, it's possible (I bet it will happen often). Now, if the rival is not in the EU, this is unlikely they'll go down the road to open a legal procedure in the EU. But you can have the example of all these companies, which are suing Google, in the EU, instead of the USA.

[markwmo]

For anyone blocking EU traffic, make sure you explain it is because of GDPR and what the issue is. This is what I'd be doing if I didn't have significant EU earnings...

And make sure that it is due to the GDPR that makes it problematic, and not due to misinformation, confusion with cookie law, etc. I don't see any reason to do for Adsense alone (if EU earnings are insignificant, then there's also no reason to not simply disable personalised ads for EU).

[NickMNS]

may go after Google for allowing small fish to continue using AdSense without following the rules.

Google is the only wild card in all this. As with everything else in this business (specifically for AdSense publishers) when Google says jump we all ask how high. But I doubt Google will start banning accounts en masse and without warning.

But what if a rival complains to EU?

That is certainly going to be the new negative SEO business model. Report your competitor. But all that will achieve is an even greater backlog of cruft that regulators will need to deal with.

Prediction this is going to end as an Epic Fail. It is going have significant and long lasting negative impact on the European economy.

The spirit of this law is great, but I doubt that the regulators had any sense of the complexity of the issue that are trying to regulate.

[Cralamarre]

The spirit of this law is great, but I doubt that the regulators had any sense of the complexity of the issue that are trying to regulate.

It certainly does seem like the creators of the GDPR were living in a bubble, where anything they could dream up was possible.

I personally am sick of all this, so I'm just going to enjoy the weekend.

[frankleeceo]

I highly doubt it will have much long term damage. Chances are that the big fishes will start requiring universal CMP snippet to serve personalized ads, and opt to serve everyyone else non-personalized for the webmasters that choose not to opt in. This is an opportunity for the keen ones to earn higher CPM.

And certain ad networks will certainly make that into a requirement, just like how ads.txt has worked its way into the system. At the end, just another hoop to jump through.

For the end consumer? It will just be another terms and condition that almost everyone clicks "accept" without reading / thinking. One more box to tick off. It'll be rare and the few that'll decline...the ones that really don't want ads? they're already using ad blockers.

I actually think Google "intentionally" "accidentally?" dropped the ball on this, they sat, and waited, and see how the industry and everyone is responding to it. It's really because the big techs, G's, FB, are at the center of this. They let IAB industry sort this out, and respond accordingly.

[NickMNS]

They let IAB industry sort this out, and respond accordingly.

There was an AdSense email this morning with indication on how to implement some sort of IAB consent mechanism. I looked into it for a bit, but it was not straight forward, so I pushed it aside. One thing of note even in the IAB stuff, was that much of it was not completed yet either. So I think everyone is dragging their feet a little on this one.

Who knows maybe they will integrate GDPR compliance in with the Better Ads Standard. But I think before any one is going to commit on this I think we are going to have to wait for a good court challenge to give the industry some sense of direction or severity or an idea of how enforcement will play out.

There is never a dull moment in this industry!

[pmays]

Actually stats after one day of using non-personalised ads: page RPM drop down about 40 % earnings. Now we are just thinking about if it worth to use Adsense and continue on creating content, because now it doesnt worth at all. In 2005 we were starting on $7.5 RPM and it goes lower and lower. Yesterday was RPM $5, today with non-personalised ads its $3.

So let me to be accurate, everything is going to be more expensive, but earnings from Adsense linearly goes down in time. And today big jump again. As i can see some big websites, they dont care about cookies consent, they don't show classic cookies info and use Adsense personalised. I will monitor it for 14 days and if nothing change, I will take risc to turn on personalised ads again without collecting consents. Maybe it will work some time and if don't and i got ban, I just sell my website or use another sort of advertising. I thought using contextual ads will be not so bad, but CTR goes down like hell and kinda low CPC as well.

This update is big game changer for all online frellancers who were earnings money from Adsense. If u are not milionare, it's really big difference if u earn $2000 per month or just $1200.

[tangor]

Expecting results you can count on in 14 days is rather risky, pro or con. Maybe six months or a year... Just sayin'

Impatience will get nothing accomplished merely churn the ulcer juices.

[trebuchet]

Probably a waste of time trying to evaluate the impact of GDRP over the next few days, as it coincides with long weekends in the US and UK. Give it a week or two before forming conclusions.

[keyplyr]

I'm seeing no difference either way.

US music site, 30% EU
US edu site, 15% EU
US eComm site, 40% EU

[darthtoon]

@QuaterPan you mentioned you've had some success simply not showing ads to EU users - how did you go about doing this? I only have about 20% visitors from the EU so this could be a good option for me.

[tangor]

Chuckles. All about "me" and revenue. Missing the point of the elephant in the room, but that's okay. Remove personalized ads and go from there.

Be prepared to take on the time, effort, and cost, of keeping PII records TO YOUR SITE (g has already said they won't) so those EU folks who want to delete their records can be accommodated. THAT is the elephant.

Switching to contextual v personalized might be sufficient, but we're too new to know for sure. That said:

Stop and think about it. G started with ads, added contextual and became a monolith. Personalized made the ka-ching king. "We" (webmasters) clung to their coat-tail and a FEW made fortunes. The rest made a living, and the actual rest (everybody else usuually) covered expenses and could take the family out to dinner once a week.

The REPORTING side of GDPR is what should be the main concern, and I suppose that is a different thread, somewhere down the line, if anyone is interested.

[keyplyr]

How long have you been an Adsense publisher Tangor?

[tangor]

As long as you have, probably earlier. Think Emmerson, Lake and Palmer: From the Beginning.

Do I still adsense? Marginal. Years ago went direct and never looked back. GDPR is not about adsense. Never was. It is about PRIVACY and REPORTING and USER CONTROL.

Adsense just got caught up in the middle of all that data collection which is the real topic, not adsense, but this is an adsense conversation so there we are.

CONTEXTUAL works. Personalized requires work on YOUR BACKEND (records). Pick and chose. Avoid by Eliminating a continent. Go with the Flow. Whatever floats the boat.

[Rasputin]

It would be reasonably straightforward to have a consent bar with a main ´I accept’ button that also had a text link offering ’no personalized ads’ - which if clicked then takes the user to a page where they can ask for their IP address to be listed, and I could add it to a db table (along with the date so it can be deleted after 12 months).
All visitors could then be compared with this table, and the ‘no personalized ads’ flag sent to google for ads for these visitors. No need for a cookie on their pc.
This would seem preferable than having all EU visitors avoiding these ads (I guess only a few % would bother), and as long as anyone could add themselves to the list in the future would presumably keep everyone happy.
This would not take long to setup, but is it enough to be compliant? Our income is 80% EU sourced.

[surfgatinho]

It is a little strange Google haven't provided a copy n paste solution to GDPR given the low technical barriers to using Adsense.

[MayankParmar]

70% down in UK after disabling personalized ads.

[Rasputin]

Further to my post above I happened to visit the bbc site topgear and they are doing pretty much as I described.

[steviec79]

What did you describe?

I've just visited and nothing happened at all. No popup, nothing.

[bgweb]

It would be reasonably straightforward to have a consent bar with a main ´I accept’ button that also had a text link offering ’no personalized ads’ - which if clicked then takes the user to a page where they can ask for their IP address to be listed, and I could add it to a db table (along with the date so it can be deleted after 12 months).

@Rasputin how would that work? What happens if you add my IP address to your table and then other members of my family or friends access your website from their device on my wi-fi? The public IP address will be the same. Likewise public wi-fi hotspots may expose the same IP for many devices.

Cookies and device IDs are the probably the best way to go at the moment. Not perfect but neither is GDPR, the WWW or anything else for that matter.

[MayankParmar]

I will enable personalized ads next week if performance remains same. Will update the popup to confirm that personalized ads are being used.

[bgweb]

@surfgatinho they have provided very simple method calls in their api:

.requestNonPersonalizedAds=1;
.requestNonPersonalizedAds=0;

Obviously they DON'T ensure full GDPR compliance but they can quickly get you to a point where it is easy to offer your users the option of switching personalised ads on and offer. Simply
1) user lands the first time, do NOT show personalised ads
2) ask user, you determine how to collect consent - subjective
3) write a cookie with consent status
4) show or don't show personalised ads on future page requests / site visits depending on cookie null or its value
5) always give user the chance to change settings - if they do overwrite the cookie with the new value

[surfgatinho]

they have provided very simple method calls in their api...

Not that straightforward. Firstly they are asking the publisher to take responsibility for working out the flow of consent and what actually constitutes consent. And then this requires a fair bit of bespoke coding to implement - a long way from just cut and pasting the Adsense code, which is probably the limit of many publisher's technical expertise.

[rokramne]

The "quick fix" for this is not turning off personalized ads. AdSense support page says this:

"Although non-personalized ads don’t use cookies or mobile ad identifiers for ad targeting, they do still use cookies or mobile ad identifiers for frequency capping, aggregated ad reporting, and to combat fraud and abuse. Therefore, you must obtain consent to use cookies or mobile ad identifiers for those purposes where legally required, per the ePrivacy Directive in certain EEA countries."
[support.google.com...]

So you still need the question and consent before serving ads. My income is 100 % from Europe and at the moment I'm not going to do anything about this problem until this get some real solutions.

[Cralamarre]

70% down in UK after disabling personalized ads.

@MayankParmar Are you still using the Silktide banner? My UK earnings have dropped down to almost nothing, and I'm wondering if the lag caused by the Silktide banner is the cause. I just removed it (no consent banner at the moment) to see if my earnings go up at all.

[steviec79]

Cralamarre, I think he uses code taken from Silktide but edited so it's all on his own site.

[MayankParmar]

Yes, its Silktide and the code is from them only.

Not sure what's wrong. Even the earnings from the US have dropped. Same traffic.

[Cralamarre]

steviec79 Are you using the same Silktide banner? Have you noticed a huge drop in UK earnings?

[Cralamarre]

I've removed the banner, just for testing purposes, to see if UK earnings go up. If they do, I'll try a different banner solution and see what happens. I think Silktide ads a lot to the page load time.