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Northeastern journalism faculty examine why British media outlets want online readers to pay if they opt out of advertising cookies.
LONDON — Readers of some of the biggest news websites in the U.K. are faced with a choice: accept tracking cookies so advertisers can make money or pay for privacy.
In a model being dubbed “consent or pay,” news providers are attempting to ensure their healthy audience figures are translating into profit in an industry that relies heavily on advertising to keep the lights on.
Want to read online news produced by the Rupert Murdoch-owned title The Sun but not accept advertising cookies? Such privacy-minded readers will have to pay £4.99 ($6.50) per month for the privilege.
Likewise, fans of reporting by the Mirror and Daily Express — titles owned by Reach plc, one of the U.K.’s biggest newspaper groups — can skip having their data shared with advertisers by purchasing a Privacy Plus package priced at £1.99 ($2.60) per month.
The move by some of the largest non-paywalled U.K. media is somewhat of a belated response to laws introduced in 2018 that saw websites in Britain forced to ask for explicit consent to use cookies — small text files that help websites remember a user — and similar tracking technologies.
Previously, websites could afford to effectively give away their content for free and, in return, could track a user and sell the information it could glean about them to advertisers. Marketeers would then use that data to create more targeted and personalized advertising.
The Sun has defended its stance, saying that it needs to ask readers who opt out of advertising cookies 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.”
John Wihbey, an associate professor of media innovation and technology at Northeastern University, says the consent or pay model — also known as “pay or OK” — is a “complicated bargain.”
“In terms of consumers allowing tracking and data access, it is obviously a huge issue these days in terms of regulation, privacy and consumer advocacy pushback,” he says.
“It is the case that Google and [Facebook owner] Meta won the online advertising war because they had all of the data to do tracking, and so it has always been logical that news media outlets would compete by collecting their own pools of data.
“None of this is great for the consumer in terms of privacy, although if it can fund news, it is obviously a complicated bargain — albeit ethically dubious,” Wihbey says.
How ethically dubious is something currently being examined. The Information Commissioner’s Office, the U.K.’s data regulator, opened a consultation about “consent or pay” business models and plans to report its findings this year.
The watchdog says it plans to investigate whether the fee being charged for privacy is “appropriate” and whether there is a fair “power balance” between the provider and those being asked to consent to being tracked.
For now at least, the combined monthly audience of 61 million people wanting to read The Sun, Mirror and the Daily Express will be faced with calls to either be tracked or pay to be anonymous.
MailOnline and The Independent both originally got in on the act, according to industry news site Press Gazette, but have since dropped the payment policy. U.K. MailOnline readers are currently faced with a banner saying “Please allow ads on our site” on every article until they consent but are not asked to part with any cash.
Journalism professor Dan Kennedy does not see privacy being a big enough concern for the “consent or pay” model to catch on in the U.S., where broadcast media often still provide news online for free.
“I don’t see any interest in the U.S. for paying money to protect your privacy. In fact, I don’t even see any interest in protecting your privacy, period. People just don’t seem to care,” Kennedy says.
“And it seems to me that if you’re going to be heavily into social media, which so many people are, that you’ve already signaled that you don’t care about privacy.
“I have seen some specialty publications where if you want to pay or maybe pay extra, you won’t see any ads at all. But that is not marketed as a privacy thing. It is simply marketed as a ‘You don’t have to look at advertising’ thing,” Kennedy says.
The Boston-based Northeastern academic says some U.S. television and radio broadcasters, along with some local news organizations, have instead pursued a voluntary membership model to help fund news-gathering operations — a tactic The Guardian in the U.K. has also deployed.
British newspapers have mainly avoided putting their news and content behind paywalls, as is more common in the U.S., with big players such as the New York Times, Washington Post and Boston Globe all pursuing a subscriber model.
On Fleet Street — the British media’s traditional London home — the likes of The Times of London (another Murdoch-owned title) and the Financial Times have strict paywalls, while other titles such as The Independent and The Daily Telegraph have experimented with hybrid models that involve some paid-for “premium” content.
But The Sun, which according to Press Gazette figures had the second-largest online audience after the BBC in July, with an audience of almost 24 million, has largely kept its news free, as have other major players such as the Mirror and The Guardian.
That decision has partly been due to the British media landscape. Unlike in the U.S., the U.K. has a state news provider in the form of the BBC. By law, most households in Britain, barring a few exceptions, have to pay an annual license fee of £169.50 ($222) that goes toward funding the corporation’s output.
With the BBC using that funding to also offer news online, it means rival news outlets have in the past been well aware that, should they choose to abandon their advertising-based revenue model and put their content behind a paywall, there is a publicly-funded competitor available that most of their readers will already be paying toward.
“I would think that there is a pretty major BBC effect going on here,” Wihbey says, explaining why paywalls are less widespread among Britain’s media.
“You have a single high-quality news source with robust public funding that can effectively cover the nation and the world. The United States has just never had any dominant public option like that, despite the best efforts of NPR and PBS.”
But that free-to-access model is starting to shift among some of the big hitters, with this step toward pushing readers to agree to share their data. Wihbey suggests the “consent or pay” debate could be an indication that the main profit model for news providers in Britain is on the cusp of a change.
“I have to think that [the BBC’s existence] has kept pressure on U.K. news sites to stay open and without paywalls,” he adds. “All of this now appears to be changing [with this move towards] allowing data tracking or requiring payment.”