Writer Cory Doctorow urged publishers in an Oct. 19 essay to favor ads based on page content, while studies leave the revenue impact of a market-wide shift unresolved.
Contextual ads use information about the page a person is viewing. Doctorow argued that this approach would give publishers more control than advertising that relies on tracking readers across websites. The available studies found higher publisher revenue when cookie data was accessible, though they measured different conditions and produced widely varying estimates.
A preliminary 2019 paper by Veronica Marotta, Vibhanshu Abhishek and Alessandro Acquisti estimated that an available cookie increased publisher revenue by about 4%, or $0.00008 per ad on average. The researchers examined one media company’s ad transactions during a week in May 2016. Their study measured publisher receipts, not a gain in advertisers’ sales.
Google found a larger short-term effect in a 2019 experiment. For a small, randomly selected group of users, it blocked access to third-party cookie data within Google Ad Manager’s programmatic advertising system. Average programmatic revenue fell 52% among its top 500 global publishers, ranked by programmatic revenue through that system.
The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) examined U.K. data from Google’s test and estimated a 70% short-term revenue decline per ad query. The regulator called its estimate an upper bound and cautioned that the test could not predict what would happen if the wider market stopped using third-party cookies.
Ster, which sells advertising for Dutch public broadcaster NPO, stopped using advertising cookies and personal data for advertising purposes on Jan. 1, 2020. Ster said a consent requirement had left only one in 10 visitors accepting cookies, prompting its move to ads selected using the content being viewed. Its accounts show online revenue of €7.388 million in 2020, up from €5.351 million in 2019, but do not establish that the targeting change caused the increase.
Control of ad-selling tools is another part of the debate. In April 2025, a U.S. federal court found that Google unlawfully maintained monopoly power in publisher ad servers and ad exchanges for open-web display advertising. The court found that Google’s AdX exchange had kept a 20% take rate on open-web display transactions for more than a decade and identified the company’s tying of its ad server and exchange as harmful to competition.
In a September 2026 remedies opinion, the court rejected a forced sale of AdX and chose requirements intended to let rival tools work with Google’s systems. The next step is a final judgment. The court called for the requirements to run for six years and generally take effect 60 days after the judgment is entered; it gave no date for that action.
