The Impact of GDPR On Content Recommendation Engines

After keeping the EU citizens intrigued and fixated for almost two years, GDPR finally came into effect on May 25, 2018. As expected, it had an immediate discernable effect on the collection and use of the personal information of the citizens across the EU. Almost all the companies operating in Europe will have to collect and use the user data under extremely stringent conditions and strict rules. Therefore, all the small-to-big companies that are collecting and leveraging the user data to enhance their user experience must comply with the GDPR regulations. If any company fails to do so, then it may have to bear heavy fines that may be as high as €20 million or 4% of the company’s global annual turn over.  

The emergence of GDPR has caused a major disruption and turbulence all over the European market. Many American News Companies have banned their websites in Europe rather than complying with the GDPR norms. A large number of companies operating in EU are still not GDPR compliant and there are many other wrench in works that need to be taken care of.

However, the most substantial impact of GDPR seems to be on the digital marketing and content marketing strategies. With the advent of GDPR, all the conventional digital advertising techniques are bound to change. A majority of websites today, collect the data of visitors and insert cookies into their (visitors’) browsers. This is to show them Display Ads on other websites that they visit. Apart from this, there are also various content recommendation engines that show users the content they might be interested in reading. For example, when you are reading an article on Forbes, you also get a list of recommended articles when you move past your current read.

As it turns out, a majority of content recommendation platforms will be benefited from the advent of GDPR. Let’s see how!

CR Platforms Will Get More Viable

One major difficulty GDPR has caused to most of the companies operating in EU is bringing some drastic changes in their existing business models. However, when it comes to content recommendation, the platforms like Outbrain, Taboola, Nativo and Revcontent may reap significant benefits from GDPR compliance. The business models of these companies are not going to have any significant changes and the platforms will remain operational without any major disruption.

Besides, leading brands and companies that were internally using their resources for running various content recommendation schemes will now rely on these platforms for their future endeavors.

Targeting Strategies Will Change

The advent of GDPR will have a major impact on the targeted marketing and advertising which requires collection and mining of the user data. As a matter of fact, the advertising schemes offered by Google and Facebook are largely influenced by targeting people of different age groups and residing in different locations. The ads are also shown to the users based on their preferences and behavioral analytics which requires their historical user data.   

Now with GDPR, all the advertising companies (including Google and Facebook) will have to comply with the stringent rules and regulations imposed by the European Council. Consequently, a lot of thought will go into publishing the native content and the targeting strategies will change accordingly.