A proposed “governance framework” for Google’s Privacy Sandbox technology lets the tech giant “mark its own homework” around competition issues.

This is the view of the Movement for an Open Web on the latest news around Google’s proposed advertising technology for its dominant Chrome browser.

The framework, which has been articulated in response to Competition and Markets Authority concerns that Privacy Sandbox could help Google “self-preference” in the digital ad market, proposes remedies such as annual reports to the CMA and the introduction of an appeals process.

In a report published this week, the CMA indicated that the framework “could resolve a range of outstanding issues” around competition and privacy in Google’s Privacy Sandbox, a suite of technologies designed to place advertisements online without the need for third-party cookies.

However, the CMA added the framework would only resolve those issues provided it “is implemented effectively. Until Google has done so, these issues will remain unresolved”.

Sandbox technology will be offered as an alternative to third-party cookies as a way of personalising online advertising, in the process making publisher ad inventory much more valuable.

What’s in Google’s proposed governance framework for Privacy Sandbox?

Google has told the CMA its Privacy Sandbox governance framework can feature:

• The introduction of a formal consultation period for major changes to any Privacy Sandbox tools with a feedback period currently pegged at three weeks
• The introduction of an externally-managed appeals process that would, for example, allow publishers to appeal Google decisions around the Sandbox
• Annual reports to the CMA and the Information Commissioner’s Office.

The co-founder of campaign group Movement for an Open Web, James Rosewell, said the framework “does little to calm real-world concerns”.

One of those concerns is that Google, which boasts large amounts of first-party data from logged-in users of products like Youtube and Gmail, will benefit disproportionately from the introduction of Sandbox technology.

Google already takes the lion’s share of the UK advertising market, banking around £14bn last year from search alone.

In its last report on the issue, in April 2024, the CMA said it was considering “whether additional restrictions may be needed to resolve this concern”. There does not appear to have been any motion on this front since then: in its latest report, the regulator wrote that it is “continuing to discuss this issue with Google”.

Rosewell said that this issue “has been flagged from day one and it’s still outstanding… We need to chalk up this anti-competitive effort as a failure”.

Google also appears not to have offered the CMA any guarantees that publishers won’t be penalised in Google search if they decline to use Privacy Sandbox.

The CMA has said previously that Google has confirmed its search engine “will not use a site’s decision to opt-out of the Topics API as a ranking signal”, but the Topics API (application programming interface) is only one of numerous that make up the Privacy Sandbox.

In this week’s report, the CMA said only that “we are continuing to discuss this issue with Google”. (Experts Press Gazette spoke with in April suggested the tech giant’s hesitancy to make further promises may arise from the fact some of the Sandbox APIs pertain to user protection, for example around spam and fraud, which could be legitimate reasons to down-rank a site.)

[Read more: Fears Google could down-rank publishers who decline to use Privacy Sandbox]

Rosewell said that the framework “is being pushed as a solution to many ills but it’s clear that it’s a weak veneer of self regulation that does little to calm real-world concerns.

“The proposed structure is little more than Google marking its own homework as it oversees its monopolistic dominance of the market. Without true independence and broad scope Google’s so-called Governance Framework will just be more window dressing.”

Responding to the criticism, a spokesperson for Google said: “We believe our approach supports healthy competition across the industry while improving user privacy. This approach, which lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, is still being discussed with regulators and we will share more details at the appropriate time.”

The CMA’s report comes after Google announced in July that it would not scrap third-party cookies on its Chrome browser, a decision that itself came four years after the company first promised to deprecate the tech.

Cookies help marketers target their ads to specific audiences and improve news publisher ad revenue by giving them, and their advertisers, a more detailed picture of who reads their content. Google’s Privacy Sandbox is intended to let advertisers target readers with relevant ads while protecting their privacy by sorting them into “cohorts” with similar interests and recent web activity.

Chrome users will now be able to choose to continue using third-party cookies if they prefer, but the CMA said its concerns around the technology remain relevant: “For the proportion of traffic where third-party cookies are unavailable, the Privacy Sandbox tools will remain important for the ad tech ecosystem to target and measure advertising”.

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Commercial staff at leading publishers have told Press Gazette they’re still set on transitioning to first-party data despite Google’s landmark decision in July not to proceed with its long-promised deprecation of third-party cookies.

Although the tech giant’s about-face caused grumbles in the news industry, executives at Press Gazette’s Future of Media Technology Conference agreed the threatened death of cookies on Google‘s dominant Chrome browser provided the impetus necessary to get their houses in order on user data.

That change, they added, appears to already be reflected in increased ad sales.

‘I definitely used the word bastards’ when Google made cookie announcement, says one executive

Asked by Press Gazette editor-in-chief Dominic Ponsford how he had reacted to Google’s July cookie announcement Morgan Stevenson, the digital transformation director at Newsquest, said: “I definitely used the word bastards.

“Simply because we put a lot of work in, preparing. I think it was a good industry kick up the arse to better prepare for leveraging our first-party data.”

But he said he felt Google had at least been “trying to create a solution to the challenge, unlike Safari and Mozilla, who just said ‘see you later, publishers’…

“I think there was a part [of me that] would have liked to just carry on with it, pull the plug, let’s see what happens. But there is so much still within the consent challenge to truly be confident that, if they pull the plug, we know what’s going to happen.”

Cookies are packets of data that give websites information about their users. If a website knows about its users it can sell ad space for higher prices, so Google’s planned deprecation of third-party cookies left publishers scrambling to develop strategies to get users to hand over their data directly.

Ultimately, Stevenson said, “it was a bit of reprieve, actually, just to get a bit more time with so many challenges to be ready for it if they really do pull the plug”.

Kyle Vinansky, the senior vice president of global sales at Forbes, had a similar view, saying: “I think everyone on our team really groaned when we heard that news. It was just one more thing in that saga.

“But I think what Google did, and others that were focused on this cookieless future, is they really got us thinking more about our first-party solutions, about the way that we could better understand our audiences…

“The biggest thing for us is it put focus on an issue where, ten years ago, despite our size and our scale, we didn’t know that much about our audiences. Now we know an awful lot.

“We’ve been investing more, even outside of first party data, and looking at ways with research panels and other levels of engagement that really allow us to dive into those groups that are most core to the advertising partners that are spending with us.”

Gareth Cross, the senior director for digital solutions at The Telegraph, said he had been less shocked: “To say it wasn’t the biggest surprise of the year is probably an understatement.

“I think the good thing from the Telegraph perspective was it hasn’t really affected the way we go about day to day, or our strategy, in any way. We were always doubling down on our first party data.”

Newsquest sees success with subscription model for advertisers

Despite their frustrations, the publishers said things appeared to be going in the right direction on ad sales.

Stevenson said Newsquest had “done very well pushing our direct sales with lots of local businesses. That’s predominantly what the Newsquest model focuses on”.

Although most of its concern was with its digital direct-sold advertising, he said “we’ve done significantly better this year at holding on to print revenues.

“One of the diversifications that we did six to seven years ago was to start introducing digital marketing services, as a reseller of those, to the same businesses that we sell our direct audiences to. That’s helped us become much stickier, for customers to stay with us.”

Services offered within that package included “SEO advice, PR copywriting, website building as well – so a whole one-stop shop and helping them to really navigate how they better improve the marketing of their own brand”.

He said Newsquest had “invested very heavily” in metrics like view time that help prove the value of their services to small business owners, and that they have improved client retention by rolling out a subscription model for ad sales.

“We looked at the best-performing campaigns for different industry styles and turned them into such good value you can’t afford to turn them off,” he said.

“You need to give three months’ notice if you want to turn it off, effectively… I’d say probably now 16 or 17% of our ad revenue is coming from a subscription model for advertisers.”

Nuno Brilha, the CMO of attention management platform Insurads, said they were looking into a similar ad subscription service as part of a recently-launched strategic partnership with Mather Economics and its content and analytics platform, Sophi.

Telegraph: Direct-sold advertising revenues up and ‘they will grow again this year’

Cross, from The Telegraph, said that over the last year “we have seen our areas of focus, our direct-sold, grow. We’ve seen our partnerships grow, and digital revenues, from an advertising perspective, are up. And they will grow again this year”.

He said the “beauty” of a subscription-first business was that “the things that come with that are all the things that help you face some other challenges” around advertising.

“So there’s a hell of a lot of first-party data – whether it’s declared, inferred – and the way we use it, we no longer need to rely on third-party data sources for our direct-sold.”

More broadly, he said, “we do things now that we would never have done before. A good example of that is if an ad format isn’t working, we remove it.

“Often what would have happened in the past – you [wouldn’t] lose that yield, you’d just add something else, and before you know it you’ve got something incredibly cluttered, diluted…

“One of my colleagues says the ad experiences are designed to engage, not enrage.”

Forbes ‘creates scarcity’ on sponsorship opportunities to add ‘exclusivity’ for partners

Forbes executive Vinansky also said he was pleased with the year – but sounded a note of caution.

“From an audience standpoint, I think we’re doing better than ever: almost 100 million users on a monthly basis, consistent growth from that regard,” he said.

“From a revenue standpoint we’re pacing ahead of last year, but Q4 for us is an incredibly important time of the year. We’re expecting a lot of information in the next month or so that’s really going to decide where those numbers fall on an annual basis.

“And we’re still up against a very challenging political landscape, as we all know. There’s a lot of economic uncertainty still, and it’s a question for us of whether or not our largest advertising partners are in a position where they want to be a part of those conversations, or they want to wait and they want to stay out of the market.”

Forbes has a partial paywall, but Vinansky said “the majority of our traffic” does not come through it.

“We continue to grow our registered users, but we view that as multifaceted – it’s people that attend our events, it’s people that subscribe to our newsletters, it’s people that subscribe for digital or print access.”

He said that direct-sold advertising is “our largest business segment”, with ads sold via the open exchange second.

Forbes SVP of global sales responds to revelation the site had been running ads on a low-visibility subdomain

Press Gazette editor Ponsford also asked Vinansky about a story that broke in March which revealed that some ads Forbes had been paid to run had appeared not on the main site but on a subdomain that could not be accessed through regular site or search engine navigation. (Forbes has denied that it had been running a so-called “Made for Advertising” or “Made for Arbitrage” site.)

“I think it’s really caused us to think about transparency in a different way,” Vinansky said.

“From a data compliance standpoint, and some of the verification partners that they were using, we taught our partners how to actually identify any advertising that ran with us on that subdomain. It just wasn’t something that they were looking for.

“The primary issue that we were dealing with there… was a matter of the page templates that we were using, and them being gallery-style templates.” (The ads on the subdomain appeared while a user clicked through slideshow-format content.)

He continued: “Once we had that conversation with our partners about why these pages existed, the way that we were using them, the way that they supported some of our most deeply-reported editorial, it had a very different outcome than the article alone that really put us in a spotlight and had us on our heels in a pretty negative way.”

A specific change following the incident, he said, was that Forbes now provides “a templated lookbook of every single page design that we use on Forbes and every single place that an ad could theoretically run.

“It was nothing that we had done before. We’ve provided screenshots before after a campaign went live, but now we’re getting to granular detail as to where your ads might run before a campaign happens.

“From a reporting standpoint, we are dialed into all of the ad verification partners and have direct relationships with them ourselves. So we encourage our partners to use that data. We encourage them to use our first-party data. We encourage them to use third-party data segments that are outside of those.

“It’s the mixed approach to making sure that everyone feels the highest levels of confidence in that reporting and where the sources are coming from and being able to tell a more complete story with it.”

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Sky Bet has been reprimanded by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) which said the site was unlawfully processing people’s data using advertising cookies without their consent.

The ICO said Sky Bet was processing people’s personal information and sharing it with advertising technology companies as soon as they accessed the website – before they were given the chance to accept or reject cookies.

This meant personalised advertising could be targeted towards them without their knowledge or consent, the ICO said.

This was going on between 10 January and 3 March 2023.

The ICO decided there had been no deliberate misuse of data but that Sky Bet’s use of certain cookies was “not lawful, transparent or fair”. The regulator has the power to issue fines but on this occasion has just decided to issue a reprimand.

Sky Bet is owned by Flutter Entertainment subsidiary Sky Betting and Gaming, which licenses the Sky brand.

Stephen Bonner, deputy commissioner at the ICO, said: “Our enforcement action against Sky Betting and Gaming is a warning that there will be consequences if organisations breach the law, and people are denied the choice over targeted advertising.”

In November the ICO began a crackdown on the compliant use of advertising cookies for the UK’s top 100 websites. Publishers were told that users must be able to “reject all” cookies “as easily” as they can “accept all”.

The ICO was also looking at whether non-essential advertising cookies were being placed before users had the chance to give consent, and whether they were placed even if the user rejected their use.

The watchdog then issued a final warning to 53 of those sites to tell them they faced enforcement action unless they made changes to comply with data protection law.

The ICO has now revealed that of those, only one website – gossip forum Tattle Life – has not engaged with the warning and will now be investigated over its use of cookies.

Some of the top websites have since begun to introduce a “consent or pay” model, which means users are asked to accept all cookie tracking or pay to opt out. Prices currently range between The Times on £6.99 and the Mirror and Express on £1.99 each. Publishers had feared if it as easy for users to reject cookies, they would overwhelmingly do so and therefore crucial advertising revenue based on the most highly-monetisable tracked audience would be lost.

Bonner said: “I’m pleased to see changes being made as a result of our intervention, with 99 of the top 100 websites either already offering a meaningful choice over advertising cookies or making improvements to gain people’s consent. For example, some have now included a ‘reject all’ button and others have made their ‘accept all’ and ‘reject all’ options equally prominent, meaning it is just as easy to reject cookies as it is to accept them.

“These changes mean that people have more agency over how their personal information is used online. Others have started to introduce alternative methods to obtain consent, such as ‘consent or pay’ – a business model we are currently reviewing.”

The ICO will soon begin scrutinising the use of cookies at the next 100 biggest websites, Bonner added.

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Six of the top 50 news websites in the UK are now asking people to hand over cash if they don’t want to share their personal data for advertising purposes.

The “consent or pay” model arrived in the UK this summer after first being introduced by European news titles including Bild and Der Spiegel in Germany. At others, such as El Pais in Spain, only paying subscribers to the site’s overall offering can opt out of personalised advertising, adding an extra subscription incentive.

Among UK publishers The Times has put the highest price on opting out of sharing data, at £6.99 per month, ahead of News UK stablemate The Sun’s “Pay to Reject” offering on £4.99.

Next is The Independent’s “Independent Ad-Free” on £4, Mail Online’s “Mail Essential” on £2.70, and Reach national websites the Mirror and Express with “Privacy Plus” at £1.99 each.

The rollout came months after the Information Commissioner‘s Office wrote to the 100 most frequented websites in the UK warning them they faced enforcement action unless they gave the “reject all” button equal weighting to “accept all” on cookie banners.

The Guardian has not implemented a consent or pay model but has been “closely following”, according to director of digital Katherine Le Ruez, who spoke at an FT Strategies conference in London this month. She said: “We all know that if you give users equal choice on a consent banner, do you want to accept or reject? Increasing numbers reject, especially with, for example, all of the ads on TV for Apple saying ‘your privacy is really important, think about your privacy’.

“So as users become more conscious of what cookies are, what tracking is, they don’t like it, they’re told they shouldn’t like it, reject all becomes a much more obvious choice for them to make, especially when nothing bad happens if they press reject all.” She noted that on many websites, including The Guardian, users don’t see any ads whatsoever if they click reject all – but urged “please don’t do this”.

She said this is because many advertisers only want consented audiences, even if publishers like The Guardian have tools to show relevant ads to readers who have opted out of cookies.

Le Ruez added: “So when you’re looking at your business model, your traffic is kind of struggling, your monetisable pages are declining. You need to bridge that gap. A really obvious thing to do is to consider making it much harder for people to reject. And the ICO has said we have to have equal weighting of accept and reject on the front layers of our consent banners, and they’ve also said that consent or pay is fine when it comes to data privacy law, therefore it makes logical sense to drive up your consent rates by making it more painful, eg, by making the user pay to reject…

“What that then means for publishers who don’t currently have consent or pay is our accept-all rates continue to decline, whereas our peers’ don’t. And when we’re thinking about being attractive to advertisers, particularly direct advertisers, scale is a really important part of our strategy, like our sales pitch is scale influence and integrity. If we don’t have the scale because we can’t deliver ad campaigns to enormous numbers of readers with all of the ad tech, the measurement, the first party data activation that advertisers want, then we start to become less relevant. Therefore, it is of no surprise that considering consent or pay as a viable option right now is quite high on publishers’ to-do lists.”

‘It has forced publishers to be explicit about the value exchange’

Danny Spears, chief operating officer at Ozone, an online ad tech and sales collaboration between the UK’s leading online publishers, told the same panel he had “mixed feelings” about consent or pay.

“I’m not sure I feel totally comfortable with the way that it manifests to the user,” he said. “But there is one positive which is, for the first time, it’s forced publishers to be very explicit about the value exchange. And I think that is something we struggled with as an industry since GDPR fell into place. So there’s something around the explicitness of the value exchange and a price being attached to that.”

And Alessandro de Zanche, founder of ADZ Strategies, cited an article he wrote in 2019 saying that user permission is “the new oil” as he said the changes have come as a result of publishers being too focused on the short term.

He told the FT Strategies panel that he had encouraged publishers to “build a funnel of trust, let’s take people – audiences, users – from anonymous to registered to logged in et cetera, let’s start communicating the value exchange”.

“We haven’t done that and now we are with our backs against the wall saying ‘what do we do?’

“I think there’s a huge missed opportunity because privacy is an opportunity for differentiation, to differentiate ourselves from less trustworthy competitors,” he said, referring to “made for advertising” sites that may create a dubious 100% consent rate by offering people a dud button to pay.

“So yes if we look at the short term we need to generate revenue. If we look at what we could have done and what we could do in the future then that’s a different story.”

What is allowed in the UK and Europe?

In March the ICO put out a call for views on allowing UK publishers implement consent or pay, sharing its initial view that in principle the model is not prohibited under data protection law but consent must be “freely given” – unlikely if there is an “unreasonably high fee” – and “fully informed”. Although it has not yet published its formal position, it has told publishers they were okay to go ahead with it.

In Europe, some publishers have been warned that the way they implemented the model broke the law even though it was “permissible in principle”. Last year German IT and tech site Heise (which today offers the option to browse without tracking or banner and video advertising for €1.95 per month for existing subscribers or €4.95 for non-subscribers) was reprimanded by the country’s data protection authority because it did not allow users to specifically consent to certain purposes.

Felix Mikolasch, data protection lawyer at Noyb (the European Center for Digital Rights) explained: “Common ‘pay or okay’ solutions are a ‘take it or leave it’ system, where you have to consent to everything or pay. The GDPR requires ‘specific’ consent to each type of processing. We welcome the decision, but after years of violating the law, a reprimand is not an adequate solution for obscure ‘pay or okay’ systems. A mere reprimand is not going to deter others from choosing this approach.”

Heise was also found to have launched tracking cookies as soon as a user opened the website, before they could give consent. It was also deemed too difficult to revoke consent at a later date.

Earlier in 2023 Austrian newsbrand Der Standard’s cookie banner (price currently set at €8.90 was found to have been uncompliant with GDPR although the model was not itself opposed.

Sara Vincent, managing director, UK at Utiq, told Press Gazette: “Publishers have started to consider ‘consent or pay’ as they are seeing more and more users declining consent for more personalised ads, following changes to privacy regulation, which starts a downward spiral in terms of monetisation for the publisher.

“Non-personalised, non-consented users are less valuable, meaning that a publisher needs to either increase traffic to compensate, or look to an alternative paid-for offering, if they want to sustain and grow their business, which is mostly reliant on advertising revenue.

“The recent move by some of the UK publishers to ‘consent and pay’ is interesting – it would be safe to assume that these publishers chose this path because of declining ad revenues and a widespread lack of understanding among users of the value exchange, which leads to increased reject rates.

“Users do not always understand that there is a cost to developing fact-checked, journalist-curated content, and why would they? For years, content on the open web has been free. If nothing else, these prompts are helping to address that. By being offered a choice of consenting or paying, the reader should have a greater appreciation that there is a cost associated with good content. The irony is that they have been paying this cost in personal data in the walled gardens for years without regard.”

Will users consent, pay or avoid altogether?

This big question is will website users pay in order to no share their data, or just go away altogether.

German tabloid Bild offers a Bild Pur [pure] subscription to opt out of tracking, cookies and personalised advertising priced at €3.99 (£3.37) or €2.99 (£2.52) for subscribers of its digital subscription package Bild Plus – but a spokesperson for the publisher told Press Gazette earlier this year that Bild Pur has “no significant impact on our subscription numbers.

“Many of our users accept the fact that we show advertisements, which are in fact often very relevant to them, for example when it comes to current offers from retailers.”

Emily Shaw, digital account director at The Kite Factory, told Press Gazette she believes “very few people will commit to paying to opt out of cookies on individual websites given the only advantage is personalisation” and they will still receive ads in most cases.

However she suggested a “one-size-fits-all solution paying to reject cookies across all websites, or one which also opted out of ads” could be more attractive to consumers.

Vincent of Utiq said: “Will users just click to consent? Time will tell. Users have different motivations: some will have the means to pay to access ad-free /non-personalised content but I expect this will be a minority.

“I expect more publishers will follow this path of ‘consent or pay’, and the more widespread the practice becomes, the more normalised it becomes – meaning that users will likely make their choice on the site they wanted to access, rather than seeking the content elsewhere.”

How are UK publishers selling it to users?

The Sun explains the value exchange to users as follows: “In response to recent enforcement action by the UK Information Commissioner against publishers, we have been forced to introduce new technology to ask our subscribers to consent to the advertising cookies that support our journalism, or pay a monthly fee that means we don’t need to use them.”

It adds that if they choose to opt out of advertising cookies they will be asked to pay a “small monthly fee to address the shortfall in revenues we need to continue to produce the quality journalism you expect from us”.

Blaming “regulatory changes”, The Times tells readers the new choice it is offering is “instead of increasing the cost of the subscription for our readers”.

“Due to recent regulatory enforcement activities by data protection authorities in the UK and across Europe, you are required to select your cookie preferences regarding personalised adverts when reading The Times and Sunday Times.

“Personalised adverts display brands and products based on your interests. These adverts are vital in supporting our award-winning journalism.”

Most of the publishers – The Sun, Mail Online, The Times – present the option as separate to any other subscription a user may have with the brand.

However, The Independent offers its “all the benefits of Independent Ad-Free” as part of its Independent Premium subscription offering which currently costs £1 for six months or £99 for a year. Unlike The Sun and Mail Online, which still show advertising but without any personalisation, this means Independent readers can have a totally ad-free experience.

Readers of The Independent are told: “Privacy – it’s your choice. Free-thinking, original journalism needs your support.”

The Express website launched a paid-for ad-free experience one year ago costing £2.99 per month or £19.99 per year. However its Privacy Plus offering, which gives users only “basic, non targeted ads”, is separate at a slightly lower price point of £1.99 per month.

It tells readers of the new “reject and pay” option: “Both options enable you to access the content and support the work of our editorial staff who are committed to providing you with quality information every day. We have introduced these choices in accordance with data protection regulations.”

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Update 6 August: The Sun has also introduced a “pay to reject” cookies option on its website.

The Sun’s option to reject personalised advertising costs £4.99 per month – making it the most expensive Press Gazette has seen so far in the UK.

In its FAQs about its Pay to Reject option, The Sun tells readers: “In response to recent enforcement action by the UK Information Commissioner against publishers, we have been forced to introduce new technology to ask our subscribers to consent to the advertising cookies that support our journalism, or pay a monthly fee that means we don’t need to use them.”

It adds: “If you consent, then your experience will be as you would normally expect. You can continue to control cookies as before. However, if you choose to opt out of advertising cookies, then we will ask you to pay a small monthly fee to address the shortfall in revenues we need to continue to produce the quality journalism you expect from us.”

Original story 25 July: Mail Online, The Independent and the websites of the Daily Mirror and Daily Express have begun requiring readers to pay for access if they do not consent to third-party cookies.

The development makes them the first major UK publishers to roll out the “consent or pay” approach to website monetisation that has already been adopted by many news businesses in Germany.

Pop-ups on mirror.co.uk and express.co.uk that began appearing this week ask readers if they want to “accept” their tracking and privacy policies or “reject all and pay”, which comes with a cost of £1.99 per month under a scheme dubbed “Privacy Plus”.

The Mail meanwhile is charging £2.70 a month for its “Mail Essential” cookie-less option and The Independent has priced its “Independent Ad-Free” offering at £4.

Readers who pay for the cookie-free experience on all four websites will still see ads, but are told there will be no sharing of their data with advertisers and they will avoid personalised advertising and only see basic, non-targeted ads.

The pop-ups on The Independent, Express and Mirror all freeze the page for the reader, while the Mail Online pop-up takes up half the screen but still allows the user to scroll the page and read stories.

The Mail’s pop-up tells readers Mail Essential is “the subscription that allows you to view Mail Online content without personalised advertising and with reduced tracking”.

The Independent, under a “Why are you asking me to pay?” FAQ, says: “The Independent relies on advertising to fund reporting, commentary and analysis of the highest quality from our teams across the globe. We are asking readers who do not want their cookies used for ad tracking and personalised advertising to support our journalism another way – paying for an advert-free experience instead.

“By subscribing to Independent Premium or Independent Ad-Free, you can help sustain the future of independent journalism and read our agenda-setting coverage uninterrupted by ads. In a changing and uncertain world, the need for trusted, free-thinking journalism has never felt more important and your support is gratefully received.”

Scroll down to see screenshots of all the publisher ‘consent or pay’ pop-ups

The pop-ups do not yet appear to have rolled out on other major Reach titles such as the Daily Star, Manchester Evening News and Liverpool Echo.

Why are publishers rolling out ‘consent or pay’ pop-ups?

Third-party cookies help marketers target more relevant adverts to consumers, which makes users who consent to them much more valuable than those who are effectively anonymous (although some publishers including Reach itself through its Mantis tool are getting around this issue by increasing their use of contextual advertising).

Rising consumer concerns around internet privacy, and the requirement that publishers easily allow readers to opt-out of cookies, have seen the number of people accepting them drop substantially. The Guardian estimated last year that one-third of readers were declining cookies, making it harder to sell the advertising that helps sustain many news publishers.

Consent or pay strategies seek to address this challenge by asking users to put a price on their privacy.

In March UK information watchdog the Information Commissioner’s Office called for views on the consent or pay model, saying that while “in principle data protection law does not prohibit” the approach, “any organisation considering such a model must be careful to ensure that consent to processing of personal information for personalised advertising has been freely given” – effectively meaning the price should not be so high that people feel they have no choice but to agree to give their data away.

In response to the publishers introducing the model, Stephen Bonner, the deputy commissioner of regulatory supervision at the Information Commissioner’s Office, said: “We expect all websites using advertising cookies or similar technologies to give people a fair choice over whether they consent to the use of such technologies, and our cookie compliance work includes ongoing engagement with some sections of the news media.

“We are aware several news outlets have now moved to a ‘consent or pay’ business model. We ran a call for views on these models in early 2024 and towards the end of the year will be publishing updates on the ICO’s position. In the meantime, we’ll continue to monitor the implementation of new approaches.”

The future of third-party cookies had been in significant doubt until this week because of Google’s long-mooted plan to phase the tool out on its dominant Chrome web browser. On Monday the company announced it had changed tack and would instead offer Google Chrome users more control over their data through “an informed choice that applies across their web browsing”. However this has raised concerns among some in the industry that most users may simply opt out of cookies anyway, in the process throttling publisher ad revenue.

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Digital advertising is at a crossroads.

It’s no shock to even the casual observer of the digital ad economy that the emergence of web 2.0, and the transition of the consumer from the desktop to the mobile, has placed the traditional digital publishing business model in peril.

The major tech platforms have captured the attention of consumers in a way traditional publishers could only dream of. A recent survey by Sensor Tower placed the daily average minutes spent by Android users on Tiktok, Youtube, Instagram and Facebook at a combined 169 minutes per day.

These new gatekeepers also have an unprecedented understanding of their users’ preferences through their choices to swipe, stop, replay and skip, helping make them highly effective environments for targeted advertising. The enormous scale of these platforms also mitigates the biggest potential downside of being too specific, which is too small of a target audience.

The perceived value of scale / targeting has also reinforced another myth that has wrought damage to the revenues of traditional publishers within the open internet, and that is the idea of the publisher “long tail”. For too long marketers have been intoxicated with the idea that there are hundreds of thousands of viable websites and blogs, all accessible through programmatic advertising, that provide the heady cocktail of targeting at scale, with low CPMs.

Why target your ideal target consumer on something as the venerable (and comparatively expensive) as The New York Times, when you can reach them for next to nothing on a vast array of lesser known and much less costly sites?

If it seems too good to be true, it almost always is.

The perpetuation of this myth has contributed not just to the defunding of traditional publishers but created the conditions for bad actors to commit billions of dollars of ad fraud. Botnets and click farms have been more than happy to help square the spreadsheets designed to keep smiles on the faces of marketing procurement teams.

All of this has wrought huge damage on both readership and advertising revenues for publishers, and that is before we even get into the threats of generative AI and the loss of signal as consumers opt out of surveillance marketing. So, what can be done to help promote the health of the digital content publishing ecosystem?

The role of the buy side

With so much change on the horizon, the opportunity exists to evolve the KPIs with which digital advertising effectiveness is judged. Impressions and clicks are outmoded and ineffective. Over-reliance on these metrics have contributed to fraud and waste, and new methods of measurement could open the door to a better understanding of the value of adjacency to content. Attention measurement providers like Lumen, Adelaide and Media Science need support from the buying community to help these alternative methodologies break through.

Additionally, agencies, marketers, and procurement teams would benefit from looking at advertising investment, and performance in a more holistic way. As with much in business, it comes down to incentives. If a media agency is judged by a client’s procurement team purely on how cheaply they can buy media, they’ll find the lowest cost impressions they can, an issue that is exacerbated by principal trading models. Procurement teams must finally accept that quantity comes at the expense of quality, and that not all impressions are created equal.

To this point, brands can help to safeguard their buys by establishing processes that encourage direct buying (Direct, PMP, PG) or show preference to platforms with direct integrations. This will help to ensure their dollars are going towards the most valuable impressions, those most likely to be actually seen by a engaged, human audience.

Agencies and clients can also help to support the publisher ecosystem by taking a good look at where their digital display and video budgets are going, transitioning to the curation of publisher allow lists, rather than building blocklists. Recently The Trade Desk and Sincera have helped to legitimise adoption of this approach through their recent publication of their qualitative ranking of sites on the open internet. While it’s still probably a little limited for some brands, it’s a step in the right direction, and at the very least encourages debate.

The role of publishers

You could argue that the first chokepoint of the modern internet was built by Google. Its absolute dominance of search rendered it a toll booth between internet enabled consumers, and the businesses that wanted to reach them. This included the publishers.

Enamoured by the surges of traffic sent their way, they saw Google as a trusted ally, failing to recognise their share of the ad revenue was quickly being siphoned away, as search (and the appeal of last click attribution) began to dominate the share of ever-expanding digital advertising budgets. Additionally, with Google all but owning the infrastructure on which much of these publishers derive their programmatic ad dollars, even more margin headed the way of Google, at the expense of their own ad revenue.

Going forward, these publishers have a duty of care to recognise that their legacy competition is no longer their biggest threat. Only through some degree of collaboration on both alternative measurement and product standards can they collectively compete with the might of the platforms.

Currently many product teams at major publishers develop unique proprietary ad assets to differentiate their products from that of their publisher contemporaries. I would argue that doing so actually risks making them less competitive compared with the platforms, who have uniform products with clear success metrics that can be served at enormous scale. Only once the premium publishers have new, more performant products that are constant across the industry will they collectively have the scale, and the convenience for the marketer, to compete.

There is no putting the genie back into the bottle. The rise of social has created an expectation in marketers and their agencies that they can scale digital campaigns easily and conveniently. Having to build and adapt separate unique assets to operate across hundreds of publishers is not easy, convenient, or for that matter cost effective. In the face of this it is completely understandable that marketers would just reach for the “easy button” and send more dollars in the direction of Meta or Youtube.

Only the collective reach of premium publishers makes for a viable alternative to Google and Meta, so premium publishers could benefit from prioritising new asset types which can be executed and measured across the premium open internet uniformly. Products for which success is also not necessarily measured by a click.

With the fate of cookie-based targeting now in the hands of Google’s users, and the long-term ramifications of generative AI search on the publishing industry still largely unknown, there is no doubt that change is on the horizon. Despite the fears, this change does not have to mean a further degradation of the ad-supported, open internet.

I believe that this crossroads represents the opportunity for a genuine rethink, and a chance for both publishers and advertisers to come closer together and to break free of some of the business-as-usual practices that have not adequately served either party for some time.

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The future funding of journalism on the open internet remains in question despite news that Google will not kill off third-party cookies on its Chrome web browser after nearly five years of promising otherwise.

Matthew Scott Goldstein, a consultant who has written previously for Press Gazette on how publishers can avoid “extinction” amid the end of cookies, summed up the views of many when he said it is “unclear exactly what this means”.

“We need another two or three weeks to find out what the fallout really is. However, my concern is this is another meteor hitting the publisher ecosystem of the internet.”

Third-party cookies underpin most publisher advertising revenue by enabling marketers to target readers with more relevant messages. Google has said it will “introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing”. But whether this turns out to be better or worse for publishers than forcing them to use Google’s Privacy Sandbox cookie-killer technology remains to be seen.

Industry ‘should continue’ transition to first-party data despite Chrome news

Few mass market, ad-funded news publishers contacted by Press Gazette on Tuesday were willing to offer a view on the cookies news.

The stock market was largely unmoved by the development. Shares in Reach, the largest publicly-listed news publisher in the UK and one which relies on display advertising for most of its digital revenue, were down 0.3% by market close on Tuesday.

Shares in Future, a magazine company that also draws substantial income from display advertising, were down less than 0.1%, and a spokesperson for the company said: “Details in the blog post remain light, and we continue to focus on cookie alternatives and selling on a first-party basis.”

Jon Mew, chief executive of digital advertising industry body IAB UK, said “many” of the organisation’s members had “more questions than clarity this morning”.

But he said that despite Google’s announcement, “it isn’t and shouldn’t be a return to cookies as the default”.

“Our industry has made huge progress over the past four years and this process has irrevocably reshaped the digital ecosystem,” Mew said. “That doesn’t just evaporate with the removal of Google’s cookie deadline.

“The reality is that a big proportion of the open web can’t be addressed by third-party cookies already so continuing to pursue other ways of targeting and measuring audiences is vital. It’s also important to note that the ICO has responded by encouraging the industry ‘to move to more private alternatives to third-party cookies – and not to resort to more opaque forms of tracking’…

“Ultimately, our hope is that the removal of Google’s deadline restores a level of certainty and control to the wider industry that is conducive to further productive collaboration and development in this area.”

[Read more: Independent set to hit four million online registrations after pivot to first-party data collection]

Anthony Katsur, the chief executive of nonprofit digital media consortium IAB Tech Lab (unrelated to IAB UK), similarly said that “the industry will likely end up in the same place. We’re just taking a different, potentially longer route to get there.

“It is important to await the exact implementation details of Chrome’s elevated ‘user choice’ approach to third-party cookies, which may put the industry in the same place.

“The advertising ecosystem still requires multiple solutions to safely and effectively target consumers, including alternative IDs, server-side solutions, Privacy Sandbox, and cookies. This isn’t materially different from what is happening today, as approximately 25% of the browser market is already cookieless, which requires solutions.”

But Google’s cookies announcement, Katsur said, gives “Chrome more time to work with the advertising ecosystem to develop a better Privacy Sandbox that works for everyone versus their initial approach, which, until recently, was developed with minimal industry input.

“The IAB Tech Lab believes the industry should continue working towards a vision of a privacy-centric world without third-party cookies.”

What have publishers said about Google’s cookie U-turn?

On the publisher side Terry Hornsby, the group digital and innovation director at Reach, said: “This announcement will come as no surprise to some in the industry… However, for Reach, this is simply another reminder that we operate in a changeable landscape.

“Our customer value strategy has always been about securing our own relationship with our customers and strengthening our advertising proposition, to make us less vulnerable to these kinds of shifts. With our large pool of first-party data as well as our own in-house advertising technology platform Mantis, we are well positioned and our focus will continue to be on strengthening our own relationships and capabilities.”

Jo Holdaway, the chief data and marketing officer at The Independent, which also draws substantial income from display advertising, said: “Circa half of our users are already unaddressable in the classic sense as they use non-Chrome browsers, so our work has not been wasted.

“Of course the decision is frustrating considering the huge amount of time and effort put in by both publishers and the ad tech community into finding robust solutions to the deprecation of third party cookies by Chrome.

“However we are committed to continuing to test new solutions, which include data collaboration, contextual targeting, universal IDs, curated marketplaces and the use of first party data for programmatic direct deals.”

A spokesperson for Mail Metro Media, which sells adds across DMG Media titles and The Telegraph, said: “Mail Metro Media strongly believes that the market should continue working on cookie-free research and developments despite Google’s announcement this week.

“Whilst there were legitimate industry-wide concerns regarding Privacy Sandbox, we welcomed the emerging initiative as it had the potential, if designed and implemented appropriately, to empower advertisers with a viable alternative. We will continue to collaborate closely with Google and other parties to ensure new and improved developments that drive best practices in the digital marketing landscape.

“As an industry, it is vital that we are all aligned to evolve, to enable targeting and measurement, and facilitate scaled advertising solutions across all browsers.”

And Damon Reeve, the chief executive of publisher-owned advertising network Ozone, said that although “the full impact of these changes on audience addressability in Chrome remains uncertain, it’s clear that they will influence media buying strategies”.

Reeve said the company, which uses first-party data signals from its publisher members, was “confident in our ability to deliver greater addressability across the Premium Web, irrespective of third-party cookie deprecation”.

Google gives consumers a choice — but does that mean they’ll agree to cookies?

Other industry insiders argued that giving users the ability to opt out of cookies would largely achieve the same end as simply doing away with them.

Jeff Green, chief executive and founder of programmatic marketing technology company The Trade Desk, said Google had “finally acknowledged what the advertising industry has been saying for years — Privacy Sandbox is not a good product and doesn’t sufficiently protect consumers’ privacy or empower advertisers. And it probably hurts publisher monetisation most.

“Google seems to finally acknowledge that the best option for them is to give consumers the choice.

“The question that remains is—will Google truly give consumers’ choice? Or will they make the decision for consumers and then bury consumers’ access to change it?

“Apple has already taken this path—one that empowers Apple and deprecates users’ experience while asserting that the user can change it if they really want to and have the will to click a lot to find the buttons.”

[Read more: Google’s new Sandbox advertising system could be ‘the end for a lot of publishers’]

Jacob Donnelly, who runs the subscription publisher A Media Operator, asked in his newsletter: “Google intends on giving users the choice of opting out of cookies. And when given the choice, will they choose anything but opting out?”

Commenting “we simply do not know what Google’s implementation will look like,” Donnelly predicted “vendors will play around with various techs. They’ll then make a bunch of lofty promises. Those promises will not be true. Publishers will get burned”.

Publishers must continue to future-proof for life after cookies

And Joe Root, the chief executive of audience platform Permutive, warned of a “false sense of security” following the cookie news.

In a statement to Press Gazette, he said: “When third-party cookie opt-out is made simple, people overwhelmingly say no, evidenced by the impact of GDPR in Europe, where over 90% of people have opted out. Forty per cent of people who use Chrome have already said no, and that is when disabling cookies is hard, let alone easy.”

In a separate statement, he said: “Google is using consumer choice as the cloak, killing the third-party cookie without necessarily having to provide an alternative solution, similar to Apple and ATT.

“The vast majority of users online are already unreachable due to signal loss in the open web today, causing publishers’ OMP yields to collapse. For advertisers, this signal loss means bidding on an ever-smaller group of users, pushing up CPMs and reducing the perceived efficiency of open web buying.”

On Linkedin, Root posted that Permutive “sits across more than a billion devices every month. Of those, 70% of consumers no longer have a cookie and within Chrome, 40% of consumers have manually disabled cookies”.

And Jochen Schlosser, chief technology officer at Adform, said the “central change” was that the move “gets Google out of the gridlock of the CMA”.

“Google’s ability to control the fate of cookies through other mechanisms still leaves all power in its hands, and so this move does not change the control dynamics. Likely without any type of regulatory approval, this development also underscores the ongoing tension between new regulations in the fields of privacy and competition law against the influence that ‘very large platforms’ have on many dimensions of the Internet.”

UK-based contextual advertising technology Illuma works with publishers including The Guardian and advertisers including Microsoft and Disney.

Chief strategy officer Ryan McBride said: “The events of the last five years, leading up to Google’s announcement this week, have made it clear that the industry should not be relying on third-party cookie infrastructure.

“While Google will no longer be officially ‘deprecating’ third-party cookies, we expect the industry impact to be more or less the same, with anticipated high consumer opt-out rates. This means the addressability challenges we’ve all been planning for, remain unchanged.

“Publishers should continue building future-proof frameworks and testing next-generation solutions which extend and enrich their first-party data, while third-party cookies are still available— benchmarking against them while they can.”

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Google has scrapped plans to ban third-party cookies on Chrome in a move that could save news publishers tens of millions in ad revenue they had expected to lose.

But campaigners have warned that the “devil is in the detail” of Google’s new plan to offer Chrome users “informed choice” about the information they share with advertisers.

And regulators have been urged to ensure that the new plan does not unfairly reinforce the tech giant’s current dominance over the £37bn advertising market.

Google’s announcement comes four years after it first said it would be replacing publisher cookies with its own privacy Sandbox technology in a move which threatened hundreds of millions of pounds of display advertising revenue across the internet.

Google’s vice president of Privacy Sandbox Anthony Chavez said in a blog post on Monday night: “…we are proposing an updated approach that elevates user choice.

“Instead of deprecating third-party cookies, we would introduce a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing, and they’d be able to adjust that choice at any time. We’re discussing this new path with regulators, and will engage with the industry as we roll this out.

“As this moves forward, it remains important for developers to have privacy-preserving alternatives. We’ll continue to make the Privacy Sandbox APIs available and invest in them to further improve privacy and utility. We also intend to offer additional privacy controls, so we plan to introduce IP Protection into Chrome’s Incognito mode.”

Web users who accept tracking cookies are far more valuable to publishers because advertisers will pay a premium to reach them with more targeted messaging.

Since 1994 cookies (tiny text files) have been stored in users’ web browsers and enabled advertisers to track them anonymously and so serve them with more relevant advertising.

They fuelled a boom in online news which saw the growth of advertising-fuelled websites like Buzzfeed, Vice and Business Insider in the 2000s.

But the online privacy movement has seen increasing numbers of users block cookies, which are already banned from Apple’s Safari browser.

Google has repeatedly delayed switching off cookies amid concerns from the UK’s Competition and Markets Authority that the move would increase the platform’s dominance over the UK advertising market.

Recent research has suggested that Privacy Sandbox could lead to a 60% reduction in online advertising revenue compared to the current cookies-based system.

Publishers have voiced deep concerns about Privacy Sandbox as a system which would reinforce Google’s market dominance and favour its own advertising platforms such as Youtube and Google Ad Manager.

In March, media consultant Matthew Scott Goldstein warned in Press Gazette that news publishers were facing the prospect of significant revenue decline in the first quarter of 2025 caused by the scheduled end of third-party cookies on Chrome and generative AI replacing conventional search.

A CMA spokesperson said on Monday: “We intervened and put in place commitments in 2022 because of concerns that Google’s Privacy Sandbox proposals could distort competition by causing advertising spend to become even more concentrated on Google’s ecosystem at the expense of its competitors.

“We will need to carefully consider Google’s new approach to Privacy Sandbox, working closely with the ICO in this regard, and welcome views on Google’s revised approach – including possible implications for consumers and market outcomes.”

‘Google’s plan to enclose the open web has failed’

The Movement for an Open Web has campaigned against Google’s plans to outlaw advertising cookies.

Co-founder James Rosewell said: “This is a clear admission by Google that their plan to enclose the open web has failed. Their goal was to remove the interoperability that enabled businesses to work together without interference from monopolists but a combination of regulatory and industry pressure has put paid to that.

“We’ve long called for Privacy Sandbox to be allowed to compete on its merits. If advertisers prefer its approach, and consumers value the alleged privacy benefits, then it will be universally adopted. What wasn’t acceptable was for a solution like this to be forced on the market whilst removing any alternative choices.

“The devil is in the detail. Google say that they’re going to be offering consumers an informed choice. What’s important is that this choice is truly informed, unbiased and applies equally to Google’s own properties as it does to other B2B and B2C providers. Movement for an Open Web will be writing to the CMA before 12th August to ensure this is in place before they think of letting Google off the commitments.”

“There’s nothing in the announcement that prevents Google doing this all over again in the future. Regulators will need to ensure there are legally binding commitments on Google to guarantee interoperability in perpetuity.

“Movement for an Open Web started this process in September 2020. It’s now clear regulators are having an impact and they’re only just turning their attention to Apple and Google’s wider product range. After all, Google and Apple work as one company where Google pay Apple $20bn per year, and Apple receive 36% of search revenue. That unholy relationship needs to be unwound.”

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office enforces rules around data privacy and is currently consulting on whether to allow UK news publishers to be more strident in their messaging around cookie consent.

UK news publishers have asked to be allowed to follow colleagues in Germany and offer readers a blunt choice: consent to advertising cookies or pay to browse a website.

ICO deputy commissioner Stephen Bonner said: “We are disappointed that Google has changed its plans and no longer intends to deprecate third-party cookies from the Chrome Browser.

“From the start of Google’s Sandbox project in 2019, it has been our view that blocking third-party cookies would be a positive step for consumers.

“The new plan set out by Google is a significant change and we will reflect on this new course of action when more detail is available.

“Our ambition to support the creation of a more privacy-friendly internet continues. Despite Google’s decision, we continue to encourage the digital advertising industry to move to more private alternatives to third-party cookies – and not to resort to more opaque forms of tracking.

“We will monitor how the industry responds and consider regulatory action where systemic non-compliance is identified for all companies including Google.”

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Sports publisher Footballco has unveiled its in-house solution to the problem of targeting ads once third-party cookies are deprecated on Google Chrome.

Described by Footballco as an “audience segmentation and targeting solution”, FC Precision creates profiles of the publisher’s readers using both first and third-party data.

Footballco says it has already been using FC Precision for certain clients and is now offering the tool to its entire customer base.

Footballco: FC Precision creates audience segments ‘beyond football’

Third-party cookies on Google Chrome, the web browser used by the majority of people online, are scheduled to be phased out in early 2025, although that date has been postponed repeatedly.

This has left many publishers searching for new ways to identify their readers so they can sell space to advertisers who want to target specific audiences.

Footballco’s FC Precision has been rolled out across its video platform FC Player and its website Goal, which Footballco says reaches “more than 80 million fans a month” and generates more than a billion social video views each month.

The company said the tool combines “data sources such as Footballco ID, behavioural data, declared data, lookalike profiling and survey feedback with in-house customised segmentation”. Footballco ID is a first-party identifier assigned to users who opt-in when using the publisher’s services.

The resulting information, Footballco said, produces audience segmentation that goes “beyond football to include interests such as travel, gaming, fashion, technology, and film”.

Vanessa Horgan, Footballco’s senior vice president of revenue operations, said: “We recognise that football fans are not one dimensional, especially when operating at the scale that we do. So it’s vital that our partners can reach not only football fans at scale but also target their varied interests outside of football.

“By tying behavioural, inferred and declared data points to our audiences, we are able to offer bespoke, performative, addressable audiences and richer insights to our clients and agencies across the lifecycle of a campaign.”

Footballco said it will eventually roll out FC Precision for its international brands Kooora, Voetbalzone, Spox and Calciomercato.

Chris Austin, the company’s senior vice president of data, insight and growth, said the tool had “already delivered business, travel and gaming audiences for clients with more custom solutions underway.

“This is underpinned by the huge scale of the audience Footballco serves combined with the unique data we collect – we have approaching one billion Footballco IDs.

“This wealth of data and insight means we’re in a great position now or whenever Google decides is the right time to remove third-party cookies”.

Google has already turned off third-party cookies for 1% of Chrome users in order to test its proposed alternative targeting technology, Google Sandbox. It is unclear, however, whether Sandbox will replace all the revenue lost when cookies are turned off: Press Gazette has previously reported the new tool could return 60% less online ad income compared with cookies.

Footballco is not the first publisher to respond to the uncertainty by creating its own tools. Reach told Press Gazette earlier this year that it would cope with the deprecation of cookies on Chrome by boosting its collection of first-party data, using industry ID and cookie-less solutions and with contextual advertising, which places ads based on the content of a page rather than the attributes of the reader.

The Guardian rolled out its contextual advertising tool, Guardian Light, in November, and has since added language on its cookie consent banners informing readers that the website is financially supported by readers opting-in to tracking.

US consumer publishing giant Dotdash Meredith reported digital revenue up 13% in the first quarter of 2024 to $209m helped by its contextual advertising targeting tool D/Cipher which it claims is more effective than cookie-based targeting.

[Read more: ‘What if Vanity Fair and ESPN FC had a baby?’ Footballco sets out US ambitions]

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Two-thirds of Britons expect to access online content about current affairs and their special interests without paying for it, according to new research.

And while the vast majority understand there is a value exchange of data going on if they want to view websites for free, most are also dissatisfied by much of the advertising they are seeing.

Online advertising company The Trade Desk commissioned research from Appinio which asked 1,500 Britons about their online habits.

The research found that when it comes to current affairs, 10.9% of respondents said they subscribe to internet content. A further 8.3% said they occasionally pay for specific current affairs content.

The proportion willing to pay for content rose when people were asked about articles relating to their interests (such as sport, showbiz, music and finance). Some 13.3% said they subscribe to read these sorts of articles with a further 9.1% paying occasionally to read this sort of content.

Some 41.9% of respondents said they subscribe to music streaming services and around two-thirds pay for TV streaming services.

Some 40.3% said they would be willing to pay for high-quality content or to support content creators.

The vast majority of respondents (87%) said they would rather exchange some of their personal data than pay money to view content online.

But most also confessed to a less-than-optimum experience when it comes to the online advertising they have seen. Overall, survey respondents said only around 5% of online ads were relevant to them.

Currently, publishers try to ensure readers view relevant ads through third-party cookies which track them anonymously. Google is planning to switch off cookies on its dominant Chrome web browser and replace them with its own Sandbox system, a move recent research suggests could cost publishers 60% of their online advertising revenue.

The Trade Desk advocates “cross channel identity solutions”, technology that anonymously tracks users without the need for cookies thereby allowing publishers to target them with more relevant advertising.

The Trade Desk vice president Phil Duffield said: “Consumers want to maintain access to the free content they know and love. As an alternative to paywalls, they need an advertising experience that benefits everyone – consumers, brands and publishers. But the current offer is often falling woefully short of that.

“With cross-channel identity solutions such as the open-source EUID and single sign-on authentication tools like Open Pass in the market, publishers can claim back the control of their own monetisation, while reshaping the internet that’s an improvement on the consumer ad experience.”

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