The Guardian has become the latest UK news publisher to begin requiring readers to pay for website access if they do not agree to being tracked by third-party cookies.
City AM, GB News and Newsquest’s network of local websites all also appear to have introduced “consent or pay” models in recent months.
The first wave of “consent or pay” sites appeared last summer when Mail Online, The Independent, the Daily Mirror, the Daily Express, The Sun and The Times all rolled out the scheme.
Why has The Guardian introduced a ‘consent or pay’ cookie model with its ‘Ad-Lite’ subscription?
The Guardian rolled out its new subscription tier, dubbed “Guardian Ad-Lite”, last week. Users who pay the £5 monthly fee still see advertising, but it is not personalised.
Under a banner titled “This is annoying. Why are you doing it?” the publisher says that despite its reader-supported revenue model “advertising remains a crucial part of how we fund our journalism” and that “readers choosing to reject personalised advertising make it more difficult for us to generate revenue from online advertising.
“Put simply, that means that the more people who press ‘reject’, the less money to pay for quality reporting. As a result, we are now asking readers to pay to reject personalised advertising.”
The more a publisher knows about its website users – either through tech like cookies which anonymously track them or by requiring them to log in – the more it can charge advertisers, because brands are willing to pay extra to be able to target specific audiences.
However the UK information watchdog the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) now requires news publishers to display a “reject all cookies” button as prominently as an “accept all” option. The Guardian’s chief advertising officer Imogen Fox said in 2023 that 30% of its users were hitting “reject all”, prompting the publisher to roll out a contextual advertising solution which places ads on articles depending on their relevance to the content.
Last week Fox wrote on The Guardian website explaining the new subscription tier to readers, saying: “Many similar news organisations have been asking readers to do this for a long time, but we have taken our time in launching Guardian Ad-Lite to make sure we can produce the best experience for readers.”
In its accounts for 2023/24 Guardian Media Group reported a 13% year-on-year decline in advertising revenue to £62.2m, contributing to a £36.5m cash outflow.
Speaking before The Guardian added the “consent or pay” model, while it was still weighing the option up, director of digital Katie Le Ruez told a conference in September that making it easier for users to reject cookies and the resulting drop in monetisable pages meant “it makes logical sense to drive up your consent rates by making it more painful, eg, by making the user pay to reject…
“What that then means for publishers who don’t currently have consent or pay is our accept-all rates continue to decline, whereas our peers’ don’t. And when we’re thinking about being attractive to advertisers, particularly direct advertisers, scale is a really important part of our strategy, like our sales pitch is scale influence and integrity. If we don’t have the scale because we can’t deliver ad campaigns to enormous numbers of readers with all of the ad tech, the measurement, the first party data activation that advertisers want, then we start to become less relevant. Therefore, it is of no surprise that considering consent or pay as a viable option right now is quite high on publishers’ to-do lists.”
What other sites have introduced pay to reject cookie models?
City AM introduced its version of the measure late last year, charging £2 per month.
GB News charges £4.99 for cookie-free access to its website – only one pence less than its cheapest full membership tier which provides access to paywalled content.
Newsquest, one of the UK’s three regional publishing giants, appears to have rolled out consent or pay requirements across its network of sites. Its brands, including Scotland’s Herald, the Brighton Argus and Norwich’s Eastern Daily Press, now charge £2.99 per month for cookie-free access.
Among the sites to have already rolled the scheme out the Mirror and Express charge the least, at £1.99 per month, while The Times charges the most, at £6.99. The Sun asks for £4.99, The Independent £4 and Mail Online £2.70.
In January the ICO published guidance advising that the consent or pay model is not prohibited under existing data protection laws as long as the fees are not so “inappropriately high” as to present an unrealistic choice.
The largest un-paywalled commercial news site in the UK not using the consent or pay model is now aggregator Yahoo News, followed by Sky News and Metro.
Despite implementing a consent or pay model on the Mirror and Express websites, publishing giant Reach has so far not rolled it out on national websites OK! and the Daily Star or its many local news sites. Other major UK sites yet to take the approach include The London Standard, ITV News, Channel 4 News, LBC and Reuters.
Email pged@pressgazette.co.uk to point out mistakes, provide story tips or send in a letter for publication on our "Letters Page" blog
