  Prestigious news publishers, and more recently, Meta, have begun to request
that users pay for privacy. Specifically, users receive a notification banner,
referred to as a pay-or-tracking wall, that requires them to (i) pay money to
avoid being tracked or (ii) consent to being tracked. These walls have invited
concerns that privacy might become a luxury. However, little is known about
pay-or-tracking walls, which prevents a meaningful discussion about their
appropriateness. This paper conducts several empirical studies and finds that
top EU publishers use pay-or-tracking walls. Their implementations involve
various approaches, including bundling the pay option with advertising-free
access or additional content. The price for not being tracked exceeds the
advertising revenue that publishers generate from a user who consents to being
tracked. Notably, publishers' traffic does not decline when implementing a
pay-or-tracking wall and most users consent to being tracked; only a few users
pay. In short, pay-or-tracking walls seem to provide the means for expanding
the practice of tracking. Publishers profit from pay-or-tracking walls and may
observe a revenue increase of 16.4% due to tracking more users than under a
cookie consent banner.
