Hello jxlarrea and welcome to WebmasterWorld [webmasterworld.com]

For most users, the consent banner will become irritating enough to get their response.

I think you're correct about the sticky overlay obstructing the ad.

I actually had a problem with a lot of clicks being disallowed in the last six months (percentage in two figures) and finally by process of elimination narrowed it down to a floating cookie consent box (popular code from Silktide). I changed it to fixed position at top and, since then and touch wood, haven't had any similar problems.

Of course, he said carefully trying not to go off topic, if people do not give active consent I believe that the new interpretation is that cookies should not be used (as they would be if visitors went to another page on the same site with Adsense without making the choice you are asking them to make).

That's what I'm afraid of. This whole thing is a total cluster$&^* without proper AdSense support for it. I send a message to Google to find out their official stance on this. I don't want to lose revenue or potentially have my account banned because of a damn EU consent modal.

But then again, if it's just a static banner on the top it will be completely ignored by the user leading to loss of revenue because of non personalized ads as default.

Cookieconsents.insites has an option for "pushdown" which keeps the overlay from interfering over any ads. That might help you.

[cookieconsent.insites.com...]

I did some testing and only 5% of users actively responded to the "pushdown" method was used.

I spent a long time changing my cookie consent notice to a 'push up' design, then Google said (via a private message) that there was no problem if the notice overlapped my ads.

I spent a long time changing my cookie consent notice to a 'push up' design, then Google said (via a private message) that there was no problem if the notice overlapped my ads.

This is not different from sticky navigation banner, this is fine, even if they overlap ads. However, there is a problem with anything sticky if you are using Adsense's overlay ads on mobiles. Because, the Adsense ad is randomly on top or bottom, and it will overlay your cookie banner at some point ...

Please correct me if I'm wrong. As far as I know the overlay should not be a problem because:

You're not allowed to show any personalized ads before you get explicit consent!
This means that if there's contextual and personalized bidding going on, you have to get consent first before showing any ad at all.

The ad request should only start after consent is given. For more information, have a look here:
[support.google.com...]

Hope this helps.

Yes, for personalized ads there are no ambiguity, the explicit consent has to be obtained before an ad request is placed. When personalized ads are disabled for EEA visitors, then it's more sensible question. Some believe there is no need to obtain the consent before the cookie is drop, some regulators consider you have to obtain the consent before anyhow. So what most sites are/were doing, was to display the cookie consent banner and still show ads in a row.

As I said plenty of times, it's too bad the ePrivacy regulation is not up yet, we wouldn't have to bother any more about the cookie consent things. The worse is, that some will get fined (as people from Germany knows, it doesn't even need to be from a regulator) , whereas in may be one year, all will be changed.

Sorry - I should have said, this was before the new GDPR settings came in.