[AstralStorm]

That's not the issue. The issue is that if the user has and sends Google cookies AdSense will use them. (And many people have third party cookies on, and AdSense might be using some tricky bypass there too.) Getting sneaky about tracking is their business model. And then cookie law is in full force.

[bartread]

Sure but it sounds like the only way to guarantee those cookies aren't sent by Adsense is simply not to use it in the event that consent is declined. Or am I missing something?

[luckylion]

That's my understanding. You can't use most Google services without prior consent. Adsense, Youtube (even youtube-nocookie, which just uses localstorage for tracking), maps etc. Google is not in the business of not tracking users.

[bartread]

But this is what I find strange. It seems unlikely that Google would simply opt out of serving people who refuse to accept advertising or tracking cookies.

Granted, from measurements on my own site that's only 1 - 1.5% of people, but Google's ad revenue for 2019 was $134.81 billion, meaning that they'd potentially be leaving $1.3 - $2 billion on the table by not serving ads to these people. Maybe it would be half that or less because the ads aren't personalised, so they're a bit more hit and miss and therefore probably wouldn't attract the same level of bids from advertisers.

But still, they'd be leaving a lot more money on the table than it would cost to fix the problem (an order of magnitude? two orders of magnitude?). Whilst they might choose to leave it due to opportunity cost, it doesn't seem that likely to me. Here's an example: I once worked at a company whose revenue sat in the £250-300 million range, and they absolutely considered it worth supporting 1% of their userbase for the extra £2 - 3 million it brought in (this is back in the day when IE7 and 8 were still a thing), because it probably only cost them high 5 to low-ish 6 figures per year in PITA workarounds to do that[1].

So, as I say, it seems odd to me that Google don't have a solution for serving cookie-free ads that require no consent.

Going back to skrtskrt's original question, "What are some good non-tracking & non-intrusive ad providers?"

[1] Obviously all us devs hated this, but it was tough to argue against from a rational standpoint.

[luckylion]

I don't know whether they really could. It's not just an issue of matching ads, it's also an issue of having relevant ads.

I use adblock by default, so I have no ad-profile at Adsense that they'd use to show me "relevant ads". When I occasionally have to debug some issue with ads somewhere, I'm essentially getting the context-sensitive, not-personalized ads, and they're terrible. At least to me they look as if they were using very simple keyword-matches with little regard to context and primary language. It may be that they don't care to invest more, but it may also be that they don't have enough ad buyers that care for unpersonalized ads so they simply don't have a large pool they can choose from.

I'm also not sure that "cookie-free" would be enough, really. If you're loading ads directly from Google, the user makes the request and can therefore be tracked by Google. Even with Google Analytics and anonymizeIp, at least in the medical sector in Germany, GA is considered opt-in only. In that sense, I'm not sure a central service that delivers ads for you can work without requiring consent.

What very much should work would be a server-side system that's sale/lead-based, where the service would crawl your site, manage your affiliate programs and create ads for you that you'd then insert into your site. That way, no third party learns anything about the individual user and you don't require consent.