The Economic Value of User Tracking for Publishers

Regulators and browsers increasingly restrict user tracking to protect users' privacy online. In two large-scale empirical studies, we study the economic implications for publishers relying on selling advertising space to finance their content. In our first study, we draw on 42 million ad impressions from 111 publishers covering EU desktop browsing traffic in 2016. In our second study, we use 218 million ad impressions from 10,526 publishers (i.e., apps) covering EU and US mobile in-app browsing...