Ask HN: Why all major news sites set so many cookies? - croh
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mikece
There's no profit in news; there's profit in selling information of users.
More cookies equals more tracking which gathers more info to sell.

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catacombs
> There's no profit in news

Subscriptions and ad space bring the money.

> there's profit in selling information of users.

Where did you read this? What news organizations are actively selling user
information?

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hedora
If you are serving targeted ads, you are selling user information.

Full stop.

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thorin
Money I guess. I'd be interested in seeing a blog post analyzing how all this
stuff gets used. For instance looking at
[https://www.theguardian.com/uk](https://www.theguardian.com/uk) I can see
hundreds of cookies against their site and loads of associated advertisers.
Most of the items are a load of hashes and ids etc so how does all this stuff
get used in reality and what are they actually storing - is it just a journey
of clicks on that page etc?

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csixty4
Ads. It's hard to make money in online news, so lots of sites feel the need to
plaster ads all over the page. Every ad is going to bring along its own
trackers to gather information on users but also to make sure the site is
meeting guaranteed minimums for viewability.

Analytics. At a minimum, there's going to be Google Analytics but there might
be some in-house tracking tool or some kind of audience statistics package
too.

Paywalls need to make sure you haven't met the limit.

A/B tests on headlines, content, and even styling mean remembering which test
group you fall into.

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Samon
Exactly this. I work for one such large multinational news corporation, and
its all about ads and analytics.

On the analytics front, we are measuring and reporting on pages and articles
at a number of levels, from audience metrics around demographics, device type,
time-of-day, time-on-page, scrolling behaviour, etc to the actual articles
themselves, the section/category, even the individual journalist. We have
real-time reporting and statistics on the 'performance' of any article,
journalist, section, etc.

Tracking and measuring user behaviour is largely performed using a number of
cookies.

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thedevindevops
1) Block 3rd Party Cookies

2) Add each news site to your browser's javascript blacklist

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sergiotapia
ads ads baby

