EU Puts The Boot Into Online Advertising, And Risks Future Revenues For European Publishers

The EU passed a new law yesterday that will affect the continent's online publishers, agencies, ad networks and advertisers. It is demanding that all internet cookies being served to a user's machine must be approved first by that user. The “cookie consent” law states that all sites carrying advertising must seek the permission of a visitor for the serving of cookies.

Stuart Robertson talks about how difficult this will be for European publishers to implement:

You could seek consent with pop-ups, if you're happy to ignore accessibility guidelines that discourage pop-ups – though users' browsers may block pop-ups by default, which risks confusion. Or you could do it with a landing page that contains a load of information and some choices. The choices for users could be:

1. Give me a load of cookies, now and in future visits, and let me get where I wanted to go in the first place – and please don't interrupt me like this again.

2. Cookies sound evil. I'm going to use American sites instead, because they don't scare me with this cookie nonsense.

3. I don't want cookies from your advertising partners, but I'll gladly pay for an ad-free version of your site. What's that you say? I need cookies for that too? OK, but just a few please.
You need to ask each new visitor just once, of course – until the visitor deletes his 'consent' cookie. Like a blow to the head, that action will cause your site to forget that you've actually met before and you'll welcome the visitor like a stranger.

How will the industry get around this absolutely ridiculously short-sighted law? Robertson tells us that there is an exception in the new law: namely “where the cookie is ‘strictly necessary’ for the provision of a service ‘explicitly requested’ by the user”. Isn’t online advertising “strictly necessary” for the provision of free content? And without cookie powered advertising there would be no online publishing – and this would infringe on an essential service requested by all European internet users.

And what about terms and conditions? It might sound facile but surely a publisher can outline in its terms and conditions that any user on its site has to consent to cookies being served. Terms and conditions should be clearly outlined to users before they accesses the content so that the new law is being adhered to.

The race to find ways to work with this new EU law has begun - and no doubt the best and brightest in the European ad tech sector will have found ways to counteract some of the restrictions of the new law before it takes effect in 2011.

If any readers have ideas on how the online advertising sector might easily work with the new law, please don't hesitate to get in touch - info [AT] farneymedia.com.