Should You Accept Tracking Cookies on Webpages?

25 May 2025 - tsp
Last update 25 May 2025
Reading time 7 mins

What Are Tracking Cookies?
How Do Tracking Cookies Influence Webpage Income?
How Are Free Webpages Financed?
The Moral Question: Should You Accept Tracking Cookies?

What Are Tracking Cookies?

When visiting a website for the first time, you’re likely to encounter a popup asking whether you’d like to accept tracking cookies. But what exactly are these cookies, and what are you really agreeing to?

Cookies are small text files that your browser voluntarily stores on your behalf when a website requests it. Since HTTP is an inherently stateless protocol, these cookies allow websites to retain information across multiple visits (i.e. single requests on the same domain). Some cookies are essential for basic website functions, such as keeping you logged in, remembering your language preferences, or managing your shopping cart. These are often called “functional” or “session” cookies. The browser sends these cookies back to the website with every subsequent request, enabling the site to recognize and tailor the experience for the user.

Tracking cookies, on the other hand, go beyond the website you’re currently visiting. They are often placed by third-party advertisers or analytics platforms and track your activity across multiple websites. This works because many webpages include references—such as embedded graphics, scripts, or iframes—that load content from third-party domains. When your browser fetches these external resources, it does so voluntarily as part of rendering the page and sends along any cookies previously set by those third-party domains. This means the decision to contact these third parties happens in your browser, not on the server side.

This behavior is not enforced or enforceable by the website provider itself; it depends on how your browser is configured to handle such requests. If you want to effectively prevent third-party tracking, you can apply a strict same-origin policy within your browser or use extensions and settings to block cookies from third-party domains altogether. This is generally far more effective than relying on cookie banners or consent dialogs, which still permit extensive data exchange unless explicitly blocked at the user level - and in contrast to banners one does not need to trust anyone to enforce the policy.

Over time, the data collected by these tracking cookies can be used to build detailed profiles of your behavior and interests across the web - especially for large providers covering huge partitions of the web and spreading their scripts over significant parts of the world wide web..

Because of growing privacy concerns, regulations like the EU’s ePrivacy Directive (the “Cookie Law”) and the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) now require websites to inform users about tracking cookies and ask for their explicit consent. This is why, since around 2018, you’ve been seeing those familiar cookie banners. Note that this solution is not technically robust, as it relies heavily on trusting the providers who operate consent platforms and on website operators to respect users’ choices. In practice, it’s more of a symbolic gesture than a strict technical safeguard. For users, this often results in additional friction in the form of intrusive cookie banners, while for site operators it introduces compliance obligations that are cumbersome but not necessarily effective at preventing tracking. We have looked into the problematic behind CMPs in special before.

How Do Tracking Cookies Influence Webpage Income?

Advertising is a major source of income for many websites, particularly those that provide content for free. Not all ads are created equal, however. Personalized, or “targeted,” ads—those informed by tracking data—are significantly more valuable to advertisers.

By collecting user behavior across the web, tracking cookies enable advertisers to deliver ads tailored to a person’s specific interests and needs. These targeted ads tend to perform better, meaning more clicks and more sales for advertisers—and more revenue for the websites hosting them.

Estimates vary, but many studies suggest that websites can earn 2–3 times more from targeted ads than from generic ones. For smaller websites and independent creators, this can make the difference between breaking even and operating at a loss.

How Are Free Webpages Financed?

While advertising (and especially targeted advertising) is a common revenue stream, it’s not the only one. Many content creators and websites are exploring alternative funding models:

Subscription Models: Readers or viewers pay a monthly fee to access premium or ad-free content. Examples include newspaper paywalls and content platforms like Substack. However, this model also has limitations: users often need to maintain multiple subscriptions to access a range of sources, which can restrict the diversity of information they are exposed to. Furthermore, it reduces the pool of freely accessible knowledge for scripts, crawlers, and AI systems—hindering the open, machine-readable information environment the early web envisioned. This trend stands in contrast to the original idea of the World Wide Web as a universally accessible network where information could be recombined, repurposed, and explored in ways far beyond what the original author might have imagined.
Donations and Crowdfunding: Platforms like Patreon or Buy Me a Coffee allow users to voluntarily support creators. However, this model typically engages only a very small subset of visitors—often those who personally know or follow the creator. As a result, it usually does not generate a large enough or reliable revenue stream to sustain content production at scale.
Affiliate Marketing: Sites earn a commission when users click on special links and make purchases. For many pages, this represents one of the most effective and reliable ways to earn money, especially when the content naturally lends itself to product recommendations or related services.
Freemium Services: Basic content is free, but users can pay for enhanced features or deeper content. This model suffers from many of the same drawbacks as the subscription model: users are less likely to engage with the content if access to full features requires payments across multiple services. The friction introduced by paywalls or locked features often discourages casual use, reducing overall reach and discoverability. In practice, the likelihood of users utilizing the full content is significantly lower compared to entirely free offerings.

Each model comes with trade-offs. Subscription-based models and freemium content can restrict access for users who are unable or unwilling to maintain multiple paid services, reducing content reach and engagement. Donation models typically attract only a small, loyal subset of users and are rarely sufficient to sustain larger projects. Affiliate marketing offers a good balance for many, but still relies on a specific type of content. In contrast, advertising—especially targeted advertising enabled by tracking cookies—remains the most universally accessible and broadly adopted strategy to generate revenue from large, diverse audiences without introducing direct cost barriers.

The Moral Question: Should You Accept Tracking Cookies?

This brings us to the ethical dimension. Should you support free websites by accepting tracking cookies, knowing that your data will be used to personalize advertising?

There’s no universal answer. If privacy is your top priority, rejecting tracking cookies is understandable. Privacy-focused browsers, tracker blockers, and even some browser extensions can help minimize data collection. You still get access to most content, albeit possibly with less relevant ads. However, it’s important to recognize that by rejecting tracking cookies, you’re effectively demanding access to content free of charge while denying the creator one of their most effective means of generating revenue. In that sense, it can be viewed as expecting others to offer their work without compensation.

There are intermediate options as well. For example, you can periodically delete tracking cookies, which reduces the amount of long-term profiling while still supporting sites during your visits. This approach lowers the cross-site and long-term tracking potential without completely opting out of the revenue model.

On the other hand, if you want to support the websites you frequent—especially small, independent, or niche publishers—accepting tracking cookies can be seen as a form of patronage. You’re allowing them to earn more from the same content without paying directly.

Ultimately, it’s about informed consent. Understanding what tracking cookies do, how they impact income, and what alternatives exist allows you to make a decision that aligns with your values. A transparent and balanced internet depends on users making such thoughtful choices.