Have you noticed that websites are increasingly plastered with more and more adverts these days?

Have you wondered why that is? Are you maybe blaming greedy website operators, just as you check out the latest ad-blocker extension for your browser?

If so, you’re right that the trend is towards more and more adverts. But you’re probably wrong in thinking it’s all about greed on the part of the website publishers.

In reality, this is an unintended consequence of something that is supposed to be a good thing.

Online privacy has become a significant concern. In particular, the ability of advertisers and publishers to track your behaviour across multiple websites is something that many people are uncomfortable with.

Both legislators and browser manufacturers have responded to this. The cookie consent laws requiring you to explicitly consent to marketing cookies, alongside browser enhancements such as “do not track” features and default blocking of third-party cookies, have made it much, much harder for advertisers to track people across multiple websites.

So, this is a good thing, right?

Well, maybe. It does address issues around privacy on the web. But it also changes the online advertising landscape considerably.

There are, essentially, two main ways of paying for online advertising: “pay per click”, where the advertiser only pays if someone actually clicks on an advert and visits their website, and “pay per view”, where the advertiser pays simply to put their advert in front of as many people as possible – the digital equivalent of print, radio or TV advertising. For historic reasons, these methods are known within the industry as CPC (which stands for “cost per click”, as seen from the advertisers perspective) and CPM (which stands for “cost per thousand”, as applied to views – the M stands for “mille”, which is Latin for a thousand).

CPC (pay per click) has, since the early 2000s, been the preferred method of online advertising. It works well for both advertisers and publishers. Advertisers like it because they only pay for adverts which actually work – they pay nothing for adverts that get ignored. Which means that none of their advertising spend is wasted, which in turn makes them willing to spend more on them. And publishers like it, because of the higher prices paid by advertisers. It’s a win-win.

The downside, for consumers, is that CPC relies on tracking. The advertiser has to know which of their adverts has been clicked on, so that they can only pay for that advert shown to that visitor. And that needs tracking cookies.

But tracking cookies are now everybody’s favourite villain, hence their discouragement by both legislation and technology.

A consequence of that is that the main advertising networks, such as Google Adsense, have mostly switched away from CPC and now use primarily CPM (pay per view) adverts. Here’s a graph which illustrates that very well:

That’s a graph of my business’s advertising revenue over the past three years. The blue line is CPC (pay per click) revenue. The red line is CPM (pay per view) revenue.

What you can clearly see is that, earlier this year, revenue flipped almost completely between CPC and CPM. And that’s not just for me, it will have happened to almost all publishers.

For you, the consumer, that may seem a good thing. You’re no longer being tracked all the way around the world by advertisers. You’re just being shown adverts, which you can ignore if you want to, just as you can in a newspaper.

But it’s not particularly good news for publishers. You can see that the red line on the right is mostly lower than the blue line on the left. That means that advertising revenue is down. Again, that’s not just for my business, it’s across the board.

That’s one of the reasons why you’re increasingly being nagged to sign up for a paid-for subscription when you view certain websites. If you visit The Guardian, for example, you’ll be confronted by a massive overlay banner pleading with you to sign up for a monthly payment. Over at The Telegraph, you’ll find that a lot of content is now behind a paywall. And The Times went fully paywalled a few years ago, something which seemed like a dubious move at the time but has now been vindicated.

But there’s another consequence for website visitors, too.

In the days of tracked CPC advertising, having a lot of adverts on a web page wasn’t always helpful. In fact, the opposite was often more true. If you had two potential adverts to show, one of which would pay you, say, 50p for a click and the other only 25p for a click, then it could make sense to  only show the higher priced one. And there was no point at all showing adverts that nobody was ever going to click on. The best solution was almost always a small number of highly-targetted, high-paying adverts.

Without tracking, though, there’s no targetting and no high-paying CPC adverts. And if a publisher is getting, say, a tenth of a penny  for a single CPM advert, then the best way to bump that up is to show half a dozen CPM adverts. Even better, show the adverts that advertisers do pay more for, such as video ads.

So what’s happening is that website visitors are increasingly confronted with websites that are smothered in adverts. Because, often, that’s the only way to maintain revenue at previous levels. And it’s also why many smaller advertising-supported websites, that don’t have the resources to implement a paywall, are in danger of dropping off the web altogether.

I don’t think that’s a good thing. I understand the concerns of privacy activists, but I also think that the response to those concerns has created a situation which, for most people, is worse.

My preferred solution would be to repeal the cookie laws. Get rid of the annoying coookie consent popups. Allow advertisers to go back to tracked and targetted CPC advertising.

Most people would, I think, prefer that to the current situation where their favourite websites are disrupted by intrusive and excessive advertising. And it’s still easy enough to avoid being tracked if you want to. Use an ad-blocker, or your browser’s “incognito” mode. Both of those damage ad revenue to a degree, but not as much as the loss of CPC.

I don’t object to people using an ad-blocker when they visit my websites, if that’s what they want to do. I do object to them not being able to choose to accept targetted advertising because they know that supports the site’s operation.

The cookie legislation was supposed to give consumers more choice. What it’s actually doing is taking choice away, and degrading their web viewing experience as a consequence. And that is most definitely not a good thing.