Quantcast reports more than 90% of visitors to EU domains grant GDPR consent

After all the teeth-gnashing, what if the vast majority of visitors give their consent for use of their personal data under General Data Privacy Regulation (GDPR) rules?

That appears to be what’s happening with the Quantcast Choice consent management platform, at least for European Union (EU) domains. The San Francisco-based firm has announced that its platform — which it says is the most widely implemented GDPR consent solution among top US and UK sites — is generating an average consent rate over 90 percent.

Although this could be excellent news for the future of GDPR-compliant online marketing and advertising, there are a few caveats.

The greater-than-90 percent rate is the rate averaged across EU-based web domains that provided consent screens — and options to drill down to make more granular choices if desired — to all visitors, including those with European Union IP addresses.

Quantcast did not have a breakdown of consent rates for visitors with US or other non-EU IP addresses, or how the consent rates broke down at the granular levels, such as those who consented to Vendor X for ad targeting but not to Vendor Y for web tracking.

In other words, this is the rate for those who said yes to everything, or yes to some things. But Quantcast did know that 92 percent of those who said yes, or about 81 percent of all users, said yes to everything. The other 8 percent said yes to some things, and drilled down to make granular choices.

The company also did not have the number of EU-based domains participating in this percentage, although it did say its consent solution supports about 9,000 unique domains worldwide.

Here are two sample consent screens from the Quantcast consent platform, as implemented by BuzzFeed and Politico. Publishers can tweak the text, linked choices, colors and other components:

Interestingly, this result seems to echo the responses found by publishing and performance marketing platform Purch, which told us last month that the user consent rate for EU-based visitors to their site was about 70 percent, for at least some use of personal data for marketing.

At the time, Purch Chief Revenue Officer Mike Kisseberth told me he had been expecting only 5 to 10 percent would grant permission.

Quantcast’s head of product and privacy Somer Simpson told me she had been expecting something in the 60 to 70 percent range.

About The Author

Barry Levine

Barry Levine covers marketing technology for Third Door Media. Previously, he covered this space as a Senior Writer for VentureBeat, and he has written about these and other tech subjects for such publications as CMSWire and NewsFactor. He founded and led the web site/unit at PBS station Thirteen/WNET; worked as an online Senior Producer/writer for Viacom; created a successful interactive game, PLAY IT BY EAR: The First CD Game; founded and led an independent film showcase, CENTER SCREEN, based at Harvard and M.I.T.; and served over five years as a consultant to the M.I.T. Media Lab. You can find him at LinkedIn, and on Twitter at xBarryLevine.