NPO dropped ad cookies after a strict GDPR test — and digital revenue went up

In May 2018, as GDPR took effect, the leadership of Nederlandse Publieke Omroep — the Dutch public broadcaster — interpreted the law strictly: visitors to its websites were prompted to opt in or out of cookies, and anyone who clicked past the consent screen without choosing was opted out by default. Ninety percent opted out. A Google study had concluded that disabling cookies cuts publisher revenue by more than 50 percent (an independent team of economists pegged the cookie premium at only 4 percent), so NPO should have been heading for financial disaster.

Instead, NPO's advertising sales house Ster built its own non-personalized ad server — a crude version sketched over a weekend that made 100,000 euros in its first month — then contracted Dutch company Ortec to build a scalable one; migrating took a year. Where Google's ad server has advertisers bidding on the user, Ster's bids on the content: pages and videos are tagged, advertisers know nothing about the user, only what the user is looking at. By January 2020 NPO dropped advertising cookies altogether — and digital revenue is dramatically up, even after the coronavirus shock.

The economics changed with the model. In the programmatic chain — DMP, DSP, exchange, SSP — the publisher is paid last; Google itself states it takes more than 30 percent when both sides use its platforms. The contextual server, which needs no tracking, renders most middlemen obsolete: money goes straight from advertiser to publisher, minus a small fee to whoever runs the server. The selling worked: advertisers converted more new customers with the contextual approach than with behavioral targeting.

The caveat is geography: Europe's stricter privacy laws mean more opted-out users and more demand for nontargeting platforms. In the US, where money 'flows to the most invasive option,' publishers such as The New York Times and Condé Nast instead experimented with a hybrid route — dropping third-party cookies while selling first-party data targeting that only works at millions-of-subscribers scale.

Ads served without cookies earned as much or more than targeted ads; digital revenue dramatically up, even through the 2020 pandemic shock

NPO treated the 90% opt-out not as a revenue emergency but as a product constraint to engineer around.

A weekend prototype proved advertisers would still buy — the 100,000-euro first month turned a compliance decision into a business model.

Contextual selling removed the tracking middlemen that absorb a large share of programmatic spend before the publisher is paid.

The results directly contradicted the industry's benchmark claim that cookies are worth more than half of publisher revenue.

The industry's most-cited number — cookie targeting worth over half of publisher revenue — did not survive a real test; a weekend-built contextual server matched the yields and cut out the middlemen.

NPO dropped advertising cookies entirely in January 2020 and revenue kept climbing through the pandemic. Tom van Bentheim, Ster's head of programmatic at the time and now its manager of digital strategy, operations and technology, said part of the rapid success came from advertisers seeing 'the privacy writing on the wall' and wanting to test a nontargeting platform. The case became a reference point in the debate over the value of targeted advertising, against Google's looming phase-out of third-party cookies and the identity-resolution sector's attempts to keep microtargeting alive.