Last Updated on December 5, 2021
On my sites you will see a nasty full page ad that requires you to agree to cookies. I know it got you. It got me too. But I have no other choice as the European data protection law is written in such a way that it requires you to actively, not passively, consent to cookies. That is, you must press the button yourself. In doing so, it requires:
– so that absolutely all cookies are registered. And this is statistics, newsletters, services from WordPress like contact forms, advertising statistics and even fonts, etc. etc.
– so that you can refuse both all together, and from each separately
– so you can change your mind
– so that all these services, except for those that completely destroy the site, are disabled until you agree.
Only an IT specialist can do this on his own, especially the last point. Therefore, I have to buy a service for this nonsense.
At the same time, as you understand, many users press the “Deny” button just in case. Thus, the user kills site statistics and ad revenue. But the user still sees the advertisement!
This is an absurd situation – I pay to be read and my work is used, and I pay separately for that I will not receive any compensation for my expenses.
It is inconvenient for a blog to exist on free hosting for various reasons: it is bad indexing, and significant restrictions on volume, and the need to look (and pay) for hosting for photos. Thus, you have to pay for hosting the site.
Collecting donations and making a subscription is obtained mainly from well-known offline people. By the way, as a rule, you have to pay for donated platforms too, if this is not unambiguously a chary and crowdfunding. Therefore, advertising remains the only way to compensate the costs. Believe me, we are not talking about earnings at all. For a start, it would be nice to cover the couple of thousand euros that have been spent over 15 years of blogging.
Thus, we get
- an endless work schedule for site maintenance, not to mention writing articles that require at least three days / on average about a week of searching for material, if you want to give some kind of voluminous picture, and not write general words.
- uncompensated expenses
To this we add the “special way of Germany” – which is called the fear of bureaucratic fines.
Even when I think about connecting advertising, I have to register a “business” and pay for it. Ok, it was only 10 euros. But now I have to fill out a certain number of additional papers to the declaration every year, having previously understood them. This is the easiest part so far.
Next, I have to arrange a blog according to all the damn rules – these are two obligatory pages with all the endless legal information (an epic for a couple of weeks on finding a free generator and translation) and all the cookies (see above).
Everything would be good if only supervisory authorities checked this case – it is clear that they will never reach a small website. But in Germany there is a so-called lawyer mafia. These people make money by looking for websites or small sellers of goods and write them Abmahnung for a couple of thousand euros for “breaking fair competition.” Like, by not writing one paragraph in legal pages that no one reads anyway, or by violating the cookie policy, you have done terrible damage to the competition with another site and received exorbitant benefits.
Thus, having earned practically nothing, I already owe everyone.
European Commision and Parliament, hallo, what is with my right to fair competition that is killed by this law. In this form, it serves exclusively for the benefit of large firms that have their own IT specialists and easily connect any paid services. Since the installation of the “correct” banner, one third of users have abandoned cookies. The rest, most likely, are bots, on which you will not really earn anything at all.
The so-called Datenschutz, by its very awesome fines and the existence of these Abmahn lawyers, makes people in Germany faint with horror, like in front of a rattlesnake, so you see all these excesses, endless pieces of paper and illogical prohibitions in Germany. But show me a user whose rights were actually protected. What harm can a person do if somebody knows that his computer has visited my site and saw ads there that Google is distributing across billions of computers?
Why user must be absolut anonym in Internet? When we walk through the city, we leave footprints. We see ads, people and cameras see us. When we surf the Internet, we leave traces in the form of an IP address. Computers see us, but they don’t know our name and where we live, how people see us in the city and don’t know our name and where we live. You can make a time limit for Cookies – a week for example. You can collect consense only for sensibility data, not for analytics.
This is pure paranoia. I don’t sell anything, I don’t collect any phone numbers. Even email in the comments is not compulsory.
Now you understand why it is easier not to write than to write.
Therefore, I beg you to be selective in the rejection of cookies and be calm about likes, ads and others. At least until Google invents Ads tracking without cookies or EU authorities think a little about people.
Kill them on monster sites that do not make money from this, but leave them on small non-profit sites that are not supported by the main business. I can guarantee that I am using the minimum required number of the most common services.
It’s a matter of survival. Because when there is not a single plus left – at least a moral one or 100 euros in plus, and not in minus by Christmas, only the minus – endless time, own money, then who will spend their energy for you. On the Internet, and especially on the German Internet, only commercial sites will remain.