The Impact of the General Data Protection Regulation on Content Providers

The impact that privacy regulation has on the welfare of consumers and on firms’ innovation has been heavily debated in the economic literature in the past few years. In 2018, the European Union enacted the European General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) - a comprehensive reform of firms’ ability to collect and use customers’ data. We study the impact of the GDPR on the advertising-supported online ecosystem. In particular, we investigate the impact that the GDPR had on content providers – such as news and media sites – by capturing data for 1,024 websites over a span of three years. We examine whether restrictions on data collection put in place by the GDPR had downstream effects on the quantity and quality of content the websites produced. For each website, we periodically collected indicators of tracking along with counts of new content published and user engagements. We additionally tracked each website’s response to the GDPR over time by examining screenshots captured at regular intervals. We analyze the data through the lens of multiple difference-in-differences models to determine how the GDPR may have impacted the quantity and quality of published content between US websites and EU websites. We find that the GDPR reduced the number of third-party cookies and tracking responses in both US and EU websites. Furthermore, the enactment of the GDPR may have to some extent negatively affected average pageviews of visitors to EU websites, relative to US websites. However, the enactment does not seem to have negatively affected the amount of content that EU websites were able to publish (relative to US websites), or the degree of average social media engagement and interaction with such content. 

Zoom link: https://eur-nl.zoom.us/j/91964733244