And to those who will complain: well, it's your greed and total lack of transparency that prompted EU legislators to actually do something about an issue that concerns their citizens in the firs place.
Maybe legal & product are wrong about the impact GDPR will have - that's certainly a possibility. But if I were a betting man, I wouldn't bet on GDPR upending the industry. If anything, I'd say it's partially seen as an opportunity: we could help other, less-technical customers, become assured that they are GDPR-compliant (while still continuing their - necessary! - digital marketing activity).
At least many of the shady players will be forced out. IMHO that alone will be a boost for general quality of ads.
> we could help other, less-technical customers, become assured that they are GDPR-compliant
I believe that a valid "you are compliant" statement can only be issued in a couple of years once there has been a solid foundation of court judgements which show how the stuff works out in practice.
I'm not naïve - there definitely will be problems, and various "entrepreneurs" will find creative ways to skirt it. But I am hopeful for a meaningful change for the better.
Let's say you search for cat food on Google, and then in Facebook you see a cat food ad, then how are you going to prove that they traded your data in an underhanded way?
Now people will have to start delivering value instead of clicks and content will be worth what it's worth rather than the advertising leverage.
This should remove a lot of pointless mind consuming junk as economically not viable.
For example: men receiving women care product ads, or advertising for baby products when I'm single etc.
Even if it's not related to ads, think recommendation sites for books or movies.
Basically this entire thing will at least for a while push us back in the Web 1.0 times. I guess that eventually someone will come with some way to obtain the same results as today (or even better) while completely skirting this regulation.
Edit: Also as all tech regulations, this one also completely ignores the human factor. Bounce rate will increase until people get accustomed to just clicking 'yes' especially if the 'no' button drawbacks are presented in a loss aversion way (imagine big red letters warning about big problems if the 'yes' button is not clicked)
So as a customer I do think that I rather have no ads at all (if they are ineffective on me) than tailored ones.
Or maybe the industry will be shaken up so hard that people are forced to think of alternatives to ads. Some cities actually managed to ban billboards, I hope that GDPR will have a similar effect on the Web.
The greed of a couple bad apples has gone so out of hand that the web is basically unusable without adblockers - while I actually work for a creative agency, as a private person I say that the current state is no longer tolerable...
> imagine big red letters warning about big problems if the 'yes' button is not clicked
Oh I assume and hope the regulators will strike down any such measures. They did, for example, also strike out mandatory newsletter acceptances (i.e. those where you could not create an account without "consenting" into handing your data over to advertising).
Adblockers and ads actually are a vicious cycle. Adblockers block ads which then requires more ads to be shown to the people without adblockers in order to recoup revenue which forces those people to install more adblockers.
We are already seeing attempts (from shady sites) to mine cryptocurrency in the background. While this might work on desktop, it is killer for the phones and not very usable.
My best bet is for the Web to find their own model of micropayments with freemium content similar to how mobile games are doing it.
As long as banks make a fortune off of microtransactions despite having no real costs associated with them micropayments in the cent (or, worse, sub-cent) range won't happen. That needs to change.
Maybe occasionally, but it's not like advertisers are going to completely lose their minds and forget how to target ads. They will just go back to targeting demographics instead of targeting specific people like they do in most forms of media.
If I were to take a stab at speculating what would happen it would go something like this. Facebook/Google just got a gift wrapped stick to beat both publishers and advertisers over the head with. The data they already collect is already very well groomed, they have tons of resources and savvy and they have enough explicit touch points with users that they can enable the GDPR requirements at the lowest costs and drive business to their platforms in droves, increasing network effects. Expect to see publishers requiring google/facebook logins to see content in the near future.
Second, the big publishers, the ones with content that people really want to see (sports) will be able to get over the high bar of consent fairly easily. They'll be able to leverage that with their other content. Some savvy big publisher is going to figure out how to leverage that into a publisher network. Also, consolidation of the publishers will happen again decreasing the costs to handle this asset, while increasing network effects.
There is room in that new world for some big adtech teams who are savvy enough and have resources enough to collect the data, simply because advertisers are unlikely to want to have to deal with further empowered Facebook/Google/Publisher networks, and at the end of the day advertisers are the ones funding this whole thing. But those adtech teams are going to get better at collecting data, not worse, in order to be viable.
So I'd predict less fragmentation of your personal data. It will be in the hands of less people, but the people that do have it, will have more of it, will be more savvy about its use and value, and will be more powerful than they were before.
So, again, I think you'll see the big guys get bigger and have more data about more people. I think small players and innovative upstarts will be hurt, both in the adtech space (which we may all feel fine losing out on) but also in the content generation space (which troubles me at least).
Personally, I'm not sure where I land on this. Generally speaking, I think anything that gives google more insight into my life is a bad thing and I think GDPR is going to be a disaster when it comes to privacy around what those big companies have on me, but I can see it going the other way. Maybe all that happens is that people move to content based advertising networks and the listicle farms go away. If so it will be a win, but I wouldn't bet on that outcome.
[disclosure] - I work in adtech, and am actively involved in GDPR efforts currently. - These are my thoughts/opinions not my employers.