Then pay.
Pay for what, they are all free sites OP listed?
It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you
61–70 of 192 posts
Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you
#62Maybe the cost of GDPR compliance just isn't worth the small amount of revenue that they might make from European visitors? US visitors are probably much more 'valuable' in terms of advertisement revenue, and also much more likely to be a subscriber. And I say this as a European myself. It sucks that I have to jump through hoops to access some sites but I can't really blame them.
I'd love to know how much an American user's data is worth and what percentage of clicks belong to European domains. I know the pervasiveness of the phrase no such thing as a free lunch , but is there really so much revenue lost by not harvesting data? (And yes, it doesn't take an MBA to notice any revenue loss should be avoided, so I understand the reluctance to publish to any market for free.)
I think the problem is not necessarily the loss in revenue due to "not harvesting data" but rather the cost of all the compliance measures and new processes the GDPR requires.
Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you
#63“We care about your privacy.” is also a real joker. Those boxes often provide no “opt-out all” button and force you to “object” to “legitimate interests” one-by-one even if you do “opt-out”.
At least they are not lying when they phrase it as "We value your privacy". I know you value it, down to a dollar.
Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you
#64Jeez, what a mess. To extend the McDonald’s analogy, when McDonald’s is serving its American customers, it doesn’t heed European laws about beef and potatoes. Because those laws are irrelevant to them, they have no bearing on McDonald’s making money (again in the context of serving their American customers). McDonald’s is never going to check what Brussels says about dairy before they make a milkshake in Spokane. Sor…
I don't understand completely why you're being downvoted. I'm european, in favour of GDPR, and I think this is a valid way of doing it. These reactions confuse me the same as using incognito or adblockers to pass paywalls and such - if that's their business model and their choice, I'm going to say no, and won't even be interested.
Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you
#65Maybe the blocked content is just divine retribution for the abhorrent cookie consent buttons we all have to press 20 times a day now.
Consent is only necessary for cookies that aren't in the interest of the user (session cookies, other cookies set to fulfil user requests).
You only "have to" press these because a lot of websites decide they'd rather torture users with popups than stop tracking personal data.
Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you
#66Then pay.
Ah yes, another headline-only reader.
Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you
#67Jeez, what a mess. To extend the McDonald’s analogy, when McDonald’s is serving its American customers, it doesn’t heed European laws about beef and potatoes. Because those laws are irrelevant to them, they have no bearing on McDonald’s making money (again in the context of serving their American customers). McDonald’s is never going to check what Brussels says about dairy before they make a milkshake in Spokane. Sor…
Someone located in Brussels does not buy a cheeseburger from a McDonalds in Spokane.
Someone located in Brussels might easily end up on the website of a Spokane newspaper.
Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you
#68> Every now and then, a link to an interesting news article is suggested to me. If the link looks like something worth the effort, plug it in to archive.is and read the output there. Or try it via outline.com instead. These tend to work for most text-based articles/sites, and archive.is often breezes right through paywalls, too.
Thanks for the advice.
To load one of the Google News links took more than 30 seconds on archive.is but eventually worked.
Outline did not work with the links as-is.
In short, this is not a comfortable workaround, but it is a working alternative.
Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you
#69I'm European and I block EU customers as well (mainly for VATMOSS though, more than GDPR, albeit I'm not sure whether I'm GDPR ready or not).
Simply put, it's a very low margin and low time investment business on my side and I'd rather work on something that can make me more money than to implement the required changes to support Europe's regulatory plat du jour.
Having worked in big businesses, even if they have the money to spend, they may face other organisational issues. Implementing any change in big businesses is not easy and takes significant more time than you would imagine.
As you correctly say, I'm sure they evaluated the cost benefit of EU visitors and concluded it wasn't as high as the cost of getting things done.
For news, that means that people will be able to access less independent content, or maybe just access what is visible behind the walled gardens of social media. For ecommerce (and VATMOSS), stores just moved to Amazon / eBay so they don't have to deal with the complexity.
As usual, regulators screwed all us up pretending to target big business (whether it's privacy or paying sales tax) and dealt a massive blow to all the small competitors of big business.
Re: It's been three years. Stop saying your European visitors are important to you
#70Jeez, what a mess. To extend the McDonald’s analogy, when McDonald’s is serving its American customers, it doesn’t heed European laws about beef and potatoes. Because those laws are irrelevant to them, they have no bearing on McDonald’s making money (again in the context of serving their American customers). McDonald’s is never going to check what Brussels says about dairy before they make a milkshake in Spokane. Sor…
This: > McDonald’s is never going to check what Brussels says about dairy before they make a milkshake in Spokane. Sorry. conflicts with this: > law is introduced, business figures out the easiest way to deal with it and get back to what they were doing, rinse and repeat. So which is it? If they care about Brussels, then they are willing to go the extra mile. If they don't care, why put up the block anyways?
But US meat is not allowed in Europe because of hormones.
So they have to adjust their EU meat supplier for servings in Europe though.