You're not allowed to "degrade the service" or allow access contingent on consent to targeted ads/tracking, so the practice isn't going to be sustainable for websites when only a tiny percentage of users give consent, seeing how they get to use the site one way or the other - have their cake and eat it too.
Implying that the majority of user's wouldn't just instantly click the largest button that says "make this annoying wall of legal text go away" whether that is agreeing to tracking or not?
While the inability to target ads based on data about you and your search history searches removes some amount of advertising income. Websites would still be allowed to show ads, and I would imagine that those ads can be specific to the article currently being viewed.
This is exactly how conventional TV advertising works, just because you don't know the gender, race, political views and entire life story of a website user, doesn't mean you can't get almost the same effect. You can target ads in general at specific content and hit most of the correct users anyway rather than targeting specific users and the content they have viewed in the past.
"The study, which looked at ads run on member networks during 2009, showed that among users who clicked on a behaviorally targeted ad, 6.8% converted. That compared with only 2.8% of those who clicked on a run-of-network ad."
No one's arguing that the targeted ads don't make more money. We are arguing that the extra value from the ads is not worth violating everyone's privacy.
A quote I heard recently is "Some of you may die, but it's a sacrifice I'm willing to make." That's what the tone towards small businesses/websites in relation to GDPR sounds like to me. I can't understand valuing this right to the "privacy" of not having your (often anonymized) identity tied to a marketing profile so much that you'd rather some free small websites no longer exist and others move to subscriptions.
