If the business was so predicated on user tracking and selling that data or using it to target ads, I think GDPR (in spirit) is saying “that’s not a business” and requiring a greater form of transparency and informed consent before a website can inflict that on a (possibly unwitting) user.

I’m not trying to say this point of view is right or wrong, just that I think there is a spirit here in the intention of GDPR to say “that’s not something we’ll allow to be called a business model.” (Obviously it doesn’t fully go that far, but it’s the idea.)

It’s not that different in spirit than regulating usury or payday loan businesses. If your business model profitably works only because it preys on people, the spirit of the regulation is to say, “that’s not a business model,” and regulate or disallow it. Usury laws in the case of excessive short-term interest rates; GDPR in the case of excessive user tracking and data privacy concerns.

So when you ask, “how can be a business sustainable in this way?” it sort of has the wrong premise.

Instead, if the business could not be profitable without this then it wasn’t actually ever a business— rather it was some other data exploitation entity, and the lack of an alternate way to be profitable in compliance with GDPR is a signal that the entity was unable to determine a way to exist without causing the kinds of harm that GDPR aims to prevent.

Again, I’m just trying to represent what I think the spirit is behind the GDPR choices— not saying they were right or wrong.

If that USA Today site sticks around and adds advertising, it will presumably be low quality inventory like the internet used to be flooded with - casinos, punch the monkey etc.

You can have sensible context-sensitive advertising without problem with GDPR. You just can't target a specific reader using its behaviour

The shitty early-web ads were already a result of shady 3rd-party ad networks selling private data.

Does a paper magazine need to run unsavoury ads? Because they don't have pay-per-click. They don't even record impressions, they have to negotiate the deal beforehand with the advertiser.

I don't want data about me to be someone's asset. I want an Internet shop to delete data about me as soon as possible after I made a purchase. That's why I want GDPR in my coutry too.

Is nobody outside of America ignorant of these laws?

Also, how much of the internet technology and content you use and consume was created by Americans? Probably quite a lot.

Why so rude?

By not building their entire business around ads and tracking.

I don’t think it’s as simple as finding the same news elsewhere for free though, or accepting this level of data collection, or subscribing to every site with micro transactions.

I would pay to use HN if the articles I clicked through to (or upvoted, or engaged with in the comments) got a piece of the pie. I’d pay a fair amount because I get a lot of value out of the aggregation and community HN offers. There’s no obvious allegiance to a particular perspective on life so one day I can enjoy a spiritual read and another I can learn about baking bread. I’m not only challenged, my curiosity is being piqued. It may be that HN works this way because there is no direct profit motive in HN itself except to point budding startups to Y Combinator.

I’m unlikely to pay an individual publication (say, The Guardian) because such publications have a specific editorial viewpoint, and more often than not it’s going to be the point of view that supports my own. My money is wasted on an echo chamber that makes me mad about the state of the world.

Neither am I likely to pay a publication that I persistently disagree with because our values are incompatible. I might read them if they have something profound to say but I’m not going to commit to them for that.

So maybe there’s something in a co-operative effort where the community collectively funds the content it engages with. But rather than it being an individual thing like with Patreon or individual subscriptions, it’s a pool you contribute to in order to participate further in the community.

On the other hand, there's quite a lot of evidence of successful businesses operating on a subscription model because they provide a good value proposition. Which leads me to conclude that your claim is simply false.

Also relevant: https://membershippuzzle.org/about/

Please stop attacking services and sites that hundreds of millions or billions of people find useful because of your own over the top histrionics.

Those users need to be protected.

The parent makes an excellent point: it’s easy to argue the other models (micro transactions, subscriptions, paywalls) failed because they were in competition with an industry that has safely operated with little to no regulation for a decade or two.

The ad industry in this situation has an insane advantage because it can make money from end-users without them even being aware that they are involved in a transaction. They don’t have to see a banner ad in order for dozens or hundreds of other businesses to learn about them.

There is no explicit contract between the website and the user in the way that there is when you agree to pay the business money in exchange for the value it offers.

So GDPR levels the playing field by removing that advantage. If an advertiser or another business runs above board they don’t have a problem. More to the point, if they can convince a user to opt in, then they have a serious value proposition to the user too.

Advertising itself is an easy and almost fallacious target. People know about adverts so they use Adblock. People have no idea what a business will do with all of the data that reaches their servers without any JS required.

I think that elides pretty important aspects from the equation. In reality, it's more like: "It's easier for Bill-brand horses to compete with John-brand horses; if you ban the steroids, amphetamines, and cruel practices John uses to get his results."

i.e "It's easier for employers to produce cheaper products by exploiting their employees if your protection of labour is on the level it was 1850"

Now sure those prices were subsidized by ads. But they can still use utargeted ads, in addition, cost of the “medium” and distribution is much lower.

You sound like the other people complaining "you know how much money I have to spend on lawyers to ignore this law??".

There are millions of businesses around the world that don't give a fig about European customers or the E.U. Hurts to hear it, but it's true.

They manage to survive an thrive without any interaction with anyone in the E.E.A.

It's a very European thing to think of the E.U. as the indispensable center of the world.

Huh? Culturally, that has absolutely not been my experience - quite the contrary.

In the case of the GDPR, it's simply a matter of "if you can't respect our citizen's basic rights, then we don't want to be doing business with you".

That has nothing to do with considering the EU to be the 'center of the world', and everything with setting the conditions for trading with it. You can either take or leave those.

Obviously if ads are less targeted then they may be less effective so advertisers will make less on ads that cost more. This will hurt their bottom line, which in turn will make the products we buy more expensive. But that's exactly the end goal. I want to pay for things (information, products) with more money rather than with slightly less money and all my integrity.

I remember the tedium of non-targeted advertising---it's what ultimately pushed me away from most traditional print and broadcast media and online. Targeted advertising occasionally brings me information I actually want; non-targeted advertising feels like such a waste of everybody's time.

I hope someone takes on the experiment of opt-in GDPR compliant ads.

I'm sure you considered all the poor people across the world that are subsidized by the ad driven model we use today. What we truly need on the internet is data gated behind pay walls to protect important information such as which facebook groups you clicked like on.

A lot of them are poor, because we don't want to pay a decent amount for the products that we consume and instead rely on people working in sweatshops in third-world countries.

You don't solve poverty by giving them 'free' products that require them to give you all their private data. You solve poverty by giving people a decent wage, so that they make these decisions themselves.

Adtech might move to correlating all these things + the website visited to target particular demographics.

ie: figure out why they are doing what they're doing and direct them to ads that capture that intent.

I think this much vaguer stuff will be fine.

To show ads you don't have to report about all of your site visits to Facebook and Google.

My god. They sucked so hard! AdSense was a revolution.