Analysis of 200+ EU news sites shows that, since GDPR came into effect, on average 22% fewer cookies and 7% fewer social sharing buttons per-page are loaded
Catalin Cimpanu / BleepingComputer :
Context & Ripple Effects
Two months into GDPR's enforcement window, BleepingComputer's analysis of 200+ EU news sites puts a number on what publishers actually stripped from their pages: on average 22% fewer cookies and 7% fewer social sharing buttons per page. That follows the earlier wave of US news sites simply going dark in Europe rather than retooling for compliance — this study measures the sites that chose to adapt instead.
The reduction is real but partial. A companion analysis of the top 2,000 sites found ad trackers per page fell only about 4% for EU users after GDPR, and later research showed most cookie consent forms still violate GDPR's informed-consent requirements through pre-ticked boxes and hidden reject options.
First-order effects
- EU news publishers are loading materially fewer third-party scripts per page, cutting their dependence on cookie-setting trackers and social platform widgets.
- Social networks lose passive data collection from European news pages as sharing buttons come out, shrinking the free tracking surface they had before GDPR.
Second-order effects
- Compliance is diverging by geography: the same top-2,000-site analysis found ad trackers per page rose 8%+ for US users while dropping for EU users, pushing publishers toward running two different privacy regimes on one site.
- Because consent flows remain non-compliant at scale, regulators and researchers gain ammunition to argue that fewer cookies reflects liability-avoidance and dark-pattern cleanup pressure — the dynamic documented in the Norwegian agency report on Facebook and Google — rather than genuine user choice.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, European news pages structurally decouple from third-party embeds, shifting the web toward first-party data and making consent-management tooling a permanent cost of publishing in the EU.
- The friction this creates is now feeding back into policy: the EU's proposed GDPR updates include simplifying cookie permission pop-ups, an acknowledgment that the consent regime it built needs rework.
The trend: GDPR is quietly rewriting the composition of European web pages — fewer third-party cookies and embeds — even as the consent mechanisms governing them remain contested and are now up for revision.