alt Hacker NewsThey are a hyper local business. The chance of making any revenue off EU users is close to 0, which is much higher than the cost of figuring out EU compliance.
The conversation went like this:
IT director: “If we serve ads or collect data from EU users we have to be GDPR compliant. That’ll cost several thousand dollars worth of employee time”
Exec: “how much revenue is attributable to EU users.”
IT: “Single digit dollars per year”
Exec: “is there a cheaper solution?”
GDPR compliance is good IT practice. It's easy to do, good for users, and states are rolling out similar laws.
But now, instead of their story being read by people all over the world, having gone viral, it's just going to pirated. Not only losing them out on revenue, but recognition as well.
This is part of the long death of online local news. They can't be bothered to do the simplest things for their site (make personal data collection optional). But they have tons of time to fill them with online cancer and make them unusable without ad blocking.