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GDPR broke one of my websites that had tens of thousands of happy users. Users loved it and expressed their delight that the website exists on a daily basis.

by TekMol 4y ago

GDPR broke one of my websites that had tens of thousands of happy users. Users loved it and expressed their delight that the website exists on a daily basis. But when I tried to monetize it without ads and via Patreon instead, nobody paid. Nobody. Recently, Google said they don't think my cookie banner is GDPR conform. But gave no info why and how I could fix it. And turned off Adsense. So I finally took the plunge and turned the site off. My feeling is that the GDPR plays into the hands of the big web players. They have the resources to deal with it. While small one-man shows don't.

lars512 4y ago
GDPR aside, I had similar shock after getting a few million users for a viral language game, but finding that basically nobody was willing to sponsor it on Patreon, even to a level to cover the basic hosting costs. It was a little hard to process at the time.
- raverbashing 4y ago
  Yeah Patreon won't cut for those cases (unless there are good perks). Maybe it's easier to sell merch.
  - TekMol 4y ago
    Have you done that?
  - solarkraft 4y ago
    Sponsorship (including merch) works for things people love - not stuff they casually use. In that case ads are probably the best option - but that's easily possible GDPR compliantly.
- TekMol 4y ago
  What did you ultimately do with it?
  - arc-in-space 4y ago
    it is kill http://greatlanguagegame.com/ http://greatlanguagegame.com/
- corrral 4y ago
  Casual games are a tough market, because there's a shitload of competition and a lot of it's free. I play Wordle most days. I do enjoy it. The amount I'd pay for it is $0, because there are a thousand other free options that would entertain me just as much. Maybe not even word games. Maybe just Microsoft Solitaire. Apple's Texas Hold 'Em. Minesweeper. Nokia Snake Game. Whatever. Despite playing Wordle so much, if you told me I had to pay $1/month for it or else it'd disappear completely, I wouldn't do it. Its competition includes free stuff like watching the clouds go by, or flicking little paper wads at the trash can.
ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago
Google broke your website, to be clear, not the GDPR. They themselves don't comply with it. And they also regularly shut people out of Adsense for seemingly arbitrary reasons with no recourse. Bad practices from a company that treats its users like garbage is not an argument against the GDPR. It's also not all that hard to comply with the GDPR as a small website.
ZeroGravitas 4y ago
Is there really no way to monitise an audience with ads without collecting their personal info? That seems more of a problem than GDPR exposing that underlying issue. edit: seems like Google have a non-personalised ad option, but it still uses cookies: > A Non-Personalized Ads solution (Ad Manager Help Center, AdSense Help Center) allows you to present EEA and UK users with a choice between personalized ads and non-personalized ads (or to choose to serve only non-personalized ads to all users in the EEA and the UK). Non-Personalized Ads only use contextual information, including coarse general (city-level) location. Although these ads don’t use cookies for ads personalization, they do use cookies to allow for frequency capping, aggregated ad reporting, and to combat fraud and abuse. Consent is therefore required to use cookies for those purposes from users in countries to which the ePrivacy Directive’s cookie provisions apply.
- muro 4y ago
  There is a reason why personalised ads are everywhere. They save advertisers money and bring higher revenues to sites hosting them.
  - ZeroGravitas 4y ago
    Yeah, there's also a reason our polluted rivers used to catch fire and children worked in mines, both those things were cheaper/more profitable to the decision maker too. But have we forced every non abusive advertising platform out of business as a result of tolerating this abuse for so long?
    - Jensson 4y ago
      A non abusive advertising platform wouldn't be subjected to GDPR problems, this should make it easier for them to compete and thrive not harder. When it was legal to just collect all data about users from everywhere and sell it etc then it was impossible for good actors to compete. What we see today is that all those bad actors who profited from all those bad actions are complaining and having problems, that is a good thing.
solarkraft 4y ago
It sounds like you encountered a small hurdle and chose to give up. Hundreds of thousands (millions?) of websites are GDPR compliant while running ads.
- TekMol 4y ago
  I have thrown quite a lot of work at it. Reading into it, looking up the legalese, building a solution that shows a cookie banner and prevents ads to load before users agreed to it etc. I only gave up after all of that failed. It just became unjustifiable to throw more time at it.
  - gspr 4y ago
    Sounds like about 5 minutes of work to me: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/7670013?hl=en https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/7670013?hl=en
    - TekMol 4y ago
      Enabling that broke the layout of the site. It takes the liberty to dynamically inject stuff into the site. Even after the user provided consent. Maybe so the user always has a menu to change their settings. They seem to try to put that dynamically injected thing below the fold. So maybe blog like sites don't mind. But on my site it wrecked havoc. I tried for a while and couldn't fix it.
InfiniteRand 4y ago
With side businesses/projects there's always a matter of balancing the hassle of maintenance with the potential for profit / happy users. GDPR does change this equation somewhat

by TekMol 4y ago

lars512 4y ago

GDPR aside, I had similar shock after getting a few million users for a viral language game, but finding that basically nobody was willing to sponsor it on Patreon, even to a level to cover the basic hosting costs. It was a little hard to process at the time.

raverbashing 4y ago
Yeah Patreon won't cut for those cases (unless there are good perks). Maybe it's easier to sell merch.
- TekMol 4y ago
  Have you done that?
- solarkraft 4y ago
  Sponsorship (including merch) works for things people love - not stuff they casually use. In that case ads are probably the best option - but that's easily possible GDPR compliantly.
TekMol 4y ago
What did you ultimately do with it?
- arc-in-space 4y ago
  it is kill http://greatlanguagegame.com/ http://greatlanguagegame.com/
corrral 4y ago
Casual games are a tough market, because there's a shitload of competition and a lot of it's free. I play Wordle most days. I do enjoy it. The amount I'd pay for it is $0, because there are a thousand other free options that would entertain me just as much. Maybe not even word games. Maybe just Microsoft Solitaire. Apple's Texas Hold 'Em. Minesweeper. Nokia Snake Game. Whatever. Despite playing Wordle so much, if you told me I had to pay $1/month for it or else it'd disappear completely, I wouldn't do it. Its competition includes free stuff like watching the clouds go by, or flicking little paper wads at the trash can.

ad404b8a372f2b9 4y ago

Google broke your website, to be clear, not the GDPR. They themselves don't comply with it. And they also regularly shut people out of Adsense for seemingly arbitrary reasons with no recourse. Bad practices from a company that treats its users like garbage is not an argument against the GDPR. It's also not all that hard to comply with the GDPR as a small website.

ZeroGravitas 4y ago

Is there really no way to monitise an audience with ads without collecting their personal info? That seems more of a problem than GDPR exposing that underlying issue. edit: seems like Google have a non-personalised ad option, but it still uses cookies: > A Non-Personalized Ads solution (Ad Manager Help Center, AdSense Help Center) allows you to present EEA and UK users with a choice between personalized ads and non-personalized ads (or to choose to serve only non-personalized ads to all users in the EEA and the UK). Non-Personalized Ads only use contextual information, including coarse general (city-level) location. Although these ads don’t use cookies for ads personalization, they do use cookies to allow for frequency capping, aggregated ad reporting, and to combat fraud and abuse. Consent is therefore required to use cookies for those purposes from users in countries to which the ePrivacy Directive’s cookie provisions apply.

muro 4y ago
There is a reason why personalised ads are everywhere. They save advertisers money and bring higher revenues to sites hosting them.
- ZeroGravitas 4y ago
  Yeah, there's also a reason our polluted rivers used to catch fire and children worked in mines, both those things were cheaper/more profitable to the decision maker too. But have we forced every non abusive advertising platform out of business as a result of tolerating this abuse for so long?
  - Jensson 4y ago
    A non abusive advertising platform wouldn't be subjected to GDPR problems, this should make it easier for them to compete and thrive not harder. When it was legal to just collect all data about users from everywhere and sell it etc then it was impossible for good actors to compete. What we see today is that all those bad actors who profited from all those bad actions are complaining and having problems, that is a good thing.

solarkraft 4y ago

It sounds like you encountered a small hurdle and chose to give up. Hundreds of thousands (millions?) of websites are GDPR compliant while running ads.

TekMol 4y ago
I have thrown quite a lot of work at it. Reading into it, looking up the legalese, building a solution that shows a cookie banner and prevents ads to load before users agreed to it etc. I only gave up after all of that failed. It just became unjustifiable to throw more time at it.
- gspr 4y ago
  Sounds like about 5 minutes of work to me: https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/7670013?hl=en https://support.google.com/adsense/answer/7670013?hl=en
  - TekMol 4y ago
    Enabling that broke the layout of the site. It takes the liberty to dynamically inject stuff into the site. Even after the user provided consent. Maybe so the user always has a menu to change their settings. They seem to try to put that dynamically injected thing below the fold. So maybe blog like sites don't mind. But on my site it wrecked havoc. I tried for a while and couldn't fix it.

InfiniteRand 4y ago

With side businesses/projects there's always a matter of balancing the hassle of maintenance with the potential for profit / happy users. GDPR does change this equation somewhat