Businesses became innovative after General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) became the reality. In order to avoid losing the revenues without affecting the compliance, leading american news paper New York Times changed its business model swiftly to accommodate the GDPR Provisions.
The New York Times blocked all open-exchange advertisement buying on its European pages, and replaced the same with behavioral targeting. Instead, NYT International focused on contextual and geographical targeting for programmatic guaranteed and private marketplace deals and has not seen ad revenues drop as a result.
The last-minute scramble to prepare for GDPR’s arrival last May, led to some U.S. publishers taking a more extreme approach and either blocking pages entirely in Europe or pulling advertising altogether. USA Today pulled all advertising in Europe — a strategy it still sticks to. In total, more than 1,000 U.S. websites blocked access in Europe last May — an extreme but understandable response given the eye-watering GDPR penalties that can be levied should they get it wrong
