How Does Disabling Cookie Tracking Impact Online News Consumption?

This paper examines the positive impact of disabling cookie tracking on news consumption. Using an individual-week level panel data from a European news website, we find that disabling cookie tracking increases the number of articles read by 54.3% and the range of categories consumed by 39.7%. These effects remain robust across various models and persist for over four months. During our sample period, the site introduced personalized news recommendations, allowing us to isolate the impact of enhanced privacy control from content personalization. Our findings suggest that the effects of disabling tracking are even more pronounced when content personalization is absent, indicating that perceived privacy control drives users’ increased news consumption. Additionally, we show that users who disable tracking gain less from personalized recommendations. This study provides initial empirical evidence of the positive effects of disabling data tracking in the digital media ecosystem.