By Minal Bopaiah

I’ve written before about the importance of subscription content sites finding alternatives to cookies. For one, Europe has announced stricter laws requiring cookie notifications. Two, consumers are getting more anxious about the implications of cookie tracking and opting not to employ cookies on their browsers and devices. And three, software companies like Mozilla and Microsoft have announced plans to abandon cookies.

While cookies are most often thought of as vital to ad tracking metrics metered and paywalled sites also use them to track free and paying subscribers. The Interactive Advertising Bureau (IAB) just released a report detailing the problems of cookies, one of which is slow page load times, a serious detriment to discovery and member engagement.

The IAB then goes on to recommend four alternatives, from “device fingerprinting” to “cloud-synchronized state,” a set of IDs set by a centralized service.

However, the problem with both cookies and device tracking is that it allows users easy work-arounds. Consumers can simply open a new browser or log onto a new device in order to continue to view free content outside their meter count (and nowadays, the majority of consumers have more than one digital device).

Therefore, we continue to advocate that subscription and metered paywalled sites use user logins to track subscribers. The Financial Times even tracks fee users by requiring email registration after three articles to keep viewing free articles.