You might have noticed that we have changed the way we ask you to consent to having cookies on your device and that we now invite you either to accept them or choose to pay to read our content.
This enables us to continue providing quality, Independent journalism to you. We do this in a variety of ways, but since we started life as a newspaper nearly 40 years ago, serving advertising to our readers has been a hugely important source of revenue. This continued as we transitioned to being a purely online news provider. But for digital advertising to work well, it relies on information about our readers so that advertisers can reach the individuals most likely to be interested in their products.
The main source of information for advertisers is third-party cookies and trackers ‘dropped’ by advertisers, ad agencies and ad tech companies onto browsers or devices. These collate information to form profiles about people. The information most commonly collected is the type of device you are reading on, your approximate location, the browser you use, the types of articles you read and other topics that you click on.
Your data is not disclosed but is aggregated in an anonymous way. The UK Information Commissioner has insisted that all websites, including news sites like ours, have a ‘reject all’ button as an option as soon as you arrive at our site.
This means that unless you agree, we cannot serve you the ads that our advertisers would like us to – so they are likely to stop booking ads with us. In tandem with most major news publishers, we face losing a significant source of revenue. Some publishers believe that this could represent an existential threat.
Most of our content is available free to everybody, and we want to continue this. We are therefore asking our readers either to allow their data to be used for advertising and ad-tracking purposes, or to pay for an ad-free experience which is equivalent in every other aspect. Other well-known publishers will be doing the same in the near future, as we try to safeguard the digital news industry and the services we provide to our readers.
When prompted you have 2 options,
1) Read for free - To receive ads and allow the function of cookie software.
2) Pay to remove ads - This rejects the use of ads and cookie software for a small fee of £4 per month. (This can be cancelled at any time before the renewal date)
If you have an Independent Premium subscription simply click "Already a paying subscriber? Log in"
Please ensure you log in with the correct email address and password