  Privacy regulations have led to many websites showing cookie banners to their
users. Usually, cookie banners present the user with the option to "accept" or
"reject" cookies. Recently, a new form of paywall-like cookie banner has taken
hold on the Web, giving users the option to either accept cookies (and
consequently user tracking) or buy a paid subscription for a tracking-free
website experience. In this paper, we perform the first completely automated
analysis of cookiewalls, i.e., cookie banners acting as a paywall. We find
cookiewalls on 0.6% of all queried 45k websites. Moreover, cookiewalls are
deployed to a large degree on European websites, e.g., for Germany we see
cookiewalls on 8.5% of top 1k websites. Additionally, websites using
cookiewalls send 6.4 times more third-party cookies and 42 times more tracking
cookies to visitors, compared to regular cookie banner websites. We also
uncover two large Subscription Management Platforms used on hundreds of
websites, which provide website operators with easy-to-setup cookiewall
solutions. Finally, we publish tools, data, and code to foster reproducibility
and further studies.
