Is there really no way to monitise an audience with ads without collecting their personal info?
That seems more of a problem than GDPR exposing that underlying issue.
edit: seems like Google have a non-personalised ad option, but it still uses cookies:
> A Non-Personalized Ads solution (Ad Manager Help Center, AdSense Help Center) allows you to present EEA and UK users with a choice between personalized ads and non-personalized ads (or to choose to serve only non-personalized ads to all users in the EEA and the UK). Non-Personalized Ads only use contextual information, including coarse general (city-level) location.
Although these ads don’t use cookies for ads personalization, they do use cookies to allow for frequency capping, aggregated ad reporting, and to combat fraud and abuse. Consent is therefore required to use cookies for those purposes from users in countries to which the ePrivacy Directive’s cookie provisions apply.
> Is there really no way to monetise an audience with ads without collecting their personal info?
There sure is: Contextual ads. DuckDuckGo does it, various documentation sites do it (https://www.ethicalads.io/), a dutch broadcaster does it (https://archive.ph/Zk4Pv). It's how newspapers used to work and TV channels still do, as well as YouTube sponsorships (and probably many more).
It improves the UX over personalized ads because
a) you don't have to invade your users' privacy (including asking them for permission to do it, obviously) and
b) the ad is actually relevant to the context the user is thinking about, instead of something completely unrelated from some other part of their life (or, more often than not, something completely random).
Contextual ads have their own set of problems for advertisers though. Think of a blog post writing about someone's traumatic experiences with pregnancy and miscarriages and the algo decides to put an ad for newborn clothes next to it. Ouch...
That can happen with personalized ads. One point of contextual ads is actually letting you control what is shown besides your content/what context you want your ad to be shown in.
Besides ... most current ads are distasteful regardless of context.
Yeah, there's also a reason our polluted rivers used to catch fire and children worked in mines, both those things were cheaper/more profitable to the decision maker too.
But have we forced every non abusive advertising platform out of business as a result of tolerating this abuse for so long?
A non abusive advertising platform wouldn't be subjected to GDPR problems, this should make it easier for them to compete and thrive not harder. When it was legal to just collect all data about users from everywhere and sell it etc then it was impossible for good actors to compete. What we see today is that all those bad actors who profited from all those bad actions are complaining and having problems, that is a good thing.
Not unless you're a NYT-level big player, and even those don't seem terribly keen on the idea. The fundamental problem is that advertisers want to know that their ads are being shown to actual people who are actually interested in what they're selling rather than bots run by fraudsters with fake websites full of fake traffic, which means tracking and attributing clickthrough, and that alone is enough to count as personally identifiable information for the purposes of laws like the GDPR. Contextual ads and not tracking users in order to select the ads doesn't solve this issue, it just reduces the profitability of advertising.
Google broke your website, to be clear, not the GDPR. They themselves don't comply with it. And they also regularly shut people out of Adsense for seemingly arbitrary reasons with no recourse. Bad practices from a company that treats its users like garbage is not an argument against the GDPR.
It's also not all that hard to comply with the GDPR as a small website.
GDPR aside, I had similar shock after getting a few million users for a viral language game, but finding that basically nobody was willing to sponsor it on Patreon, even to a level to cover the basic hosting costs. It was a little hard to process at the time.
Casual games are a tough market, because there's a shitload of competition and a lot of it's free.
I play Wordle most days. I do enjoy it. The amount I'd pay for it is $0, because there are a thousand other free options that would entertain me just as much. Maybe not even word games. Maybe just Microsoft Solitaire. Apple's Texas Hold 'Em. Minesweeper. Nokia Snake Game. Whatever. Despite playing Wordle so much, if you told me I had to pay $1/month for it or else it'd disappear completely, I wouldn't do it. Its competition includes free stuff like watching the clouds go by, or flicking little paper wads at the trash can.
Sponsorship (including merch) works for things people love - not stuff they casually use. In that case ads are probably the best option - but that's easily possible GDPR compliantly.
With side businesses/projects there's always a matter of balancing the hassle of maintenance with the potential for profit / happy users. GDPR does change this equation somewhat
It sounds like you encountered a small hurdle and chose to give up. Hundreds of thousands (millions?) of websites are GDPR compliant while running ads.
It takes the liberty to dynamically inject stuff into the site. Even after the user provided consent. Maybe so the user always has a menu to change their settings.
They seem to try to put that dynamically injected thing below the fold. So maybe blog like sites don't mind.
Users loved it and expressed their delight that the website exists on a daily basis.
But when I tried to monetize it without ads and via Patreon instead, nobody paid. Nobody.
Recently, Google said they don't think my cookie banner is GDPR conform. But gave no info why and how I could fix it. And turned off Adsense.
So I finally took the plunge and turned the site off.
My feeling is that the GDPR plays into the hands of the big web players. They have the resources to deal with it. While small one-man shows don't.