It is starting to look more and more as if the underlying idea of GDPR is being realised. The European Union introduced the data regime with the aim of improving the privacy of European citizens. Successfully, because research shows that the number of ad-trackers is decreasing considerably. Strikingly enough, Google is a winner of this trend.
Joint research by employees of Cliqz and Ghostery shows that the number of ad-trackers that are placed on the devices of visitors of websites from the European Union is decreasing. The team compared the number of trackers in the month before and the month after GDPR took effect. It looked at the top 2,000 largest websites and visits by EU citizens and Americans.
Fewer trackers
The average number of trackers fell by four percent between April and July for visitors from the European Union. Interestingly enough, the number of trackers for visitors from the United States increased by eight percent in the same period. Only on the websites of banks did the number of trackers appear to be increasing. At the same time there was also an opposite trend here in the US and the number of American trackers decreased.
In a joint blog on the Cliqz site, the research team writes the following: The impact of GDPR on trackers in Europe is visible on all types of websites. The decrease seems to be especially true for websites with many trackers. News websites still contain an average of 12.4 trackers – most of all the types of sites that were visited. At the same time, this is still a decrease of 7.5%. E-commerce saw a smaller decrease from 6.9 percent to 9.5 per page. Furthermore, the number of trackers on recreation sites decreased by 6.7 percent to 10.7 trackers per page.
Google wins
Strikingly, Google is the biggest winner of GDPR. The number of trackers on sites is decreasing. This means that administrators increasingly have to choose which trackers to allow. Companies like Google have a lot of resources and that makes it possible to invest in compliance. It is therefore often attractive to continue to purchase their services. As a result, Google was able to expand its dominant position by 1 percent.
Other advertisers saw a decrease in their reach. Facebook lost almost 7 percent, but it is mainly the smaller advertising agencies that are experiencing declines. The smallest agencies saw a decrease of more than thirty percent.
This news article was automatically translated from Dutch to give Techzine.eu a head start. All news articles after September 1, 2019 are written in native English and NOT translated. All our background stories are written in native English as well. For more information read our launch article.
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