> On the Internet, nobody cares where you are located.
The EU cares.
The EU cares.
To rephrase: if you produce an asset that can be shared with an additional significant audience at a fraction of its production cost, and all you need to do is a one-time compliance cost that probably will soon become mandatory for your primary area of distribution, then how can it be a good practice to continue banning your customer-base based on what continent are they in the world?
You can't have the cake and eat it too. You can't pass regulations and then complain people don't want to do business with you.
Any one-time cost can be amortized in time by recurring revenues, after which you're left with pure profit.
Technical work (manage your reader's cookie and policy preferences etc) is a one-time cost. Revenue from EU readers is an ongoing benefit. Hence, as long as EU income is greater than its traffic serving costs, you're bound to come ahead after some amortization time.
2. There are other ongoing costs to comply with gdpr outside of the server fees such as manpower to comply with gdpr requests, lawyer fees if they get sued and obviously fines if they lose any lawsuit related to it.