When every mouse click makes the grave even deeper.
You pay for the success of your competitors
Imagine you are advertising. But not for you, but for your competitors. Only: you spend the money and your prospective customers become customers of your competitors, your sales shrink, your costs rise and you finance the success of your competitors.
This happens tens of thousands of times, every day in Germany, in Europe, all over the world. Why? Because you believe that just because something doesn't cost anything, it's free. In fact, if something is free, you are the product.
YouTube wants your users' data
You know that videos can greatly enhance your website and keep your visitors better informed and engaged for longer. That's why you upload your videos to YouTube and add the links to your website. It's quick and easy. You don't have to pay anything. How practical.
The trap has now been sprung and YouTube, which belongs to Alphabet like Google, is ringing the cash registers. First of all, you have agreed, among other things, that YouTube now has the rights to your videos. You have agreed that YouTube can monetize your videos. That they can resell the data etc. And that's what they do, with your help:
Fig.: The video has ended and new videos are suggested to your visitor. The aim is to keep the user as long as possible in order to show them as much advertising as possible.
Every click - a bundle of data
Every time a visitor plays one of your YouTube videos, you transmit your visitor's data to YouTube. This is the following information:
- Rough location
- Detailed location
- Contact information
- physical address
- E-mail address
- Name
- Phone number
- Search history
- Browsing history
- Identifiers
- User ID
- Device ID
- Usage data
- Product interaction
- Advertising data
Fig.: The video is running and the viewer's behavior is reported to YouTube almost every second. This process is also known as tracking.
As I said, with each individual call. YouTube stores this data for life and uses it to refine your user profile. Since your visitor has been on the Internet, every single action they take leaves traces. Alphabet only offers these services in order to obtain your users' data. Many website operators don't know any better and fall for it.
For example, you use the letters (fonts) from Google or the map service Google Maps. All you have to do is call up the page and the data is recorded and stored. And this data is worth its weight in gold.
Fig.: Due to the GDPR, a consent banner is mandatory for embedded YouTube videos. Many users reject it. The result: the video remains unseen. A missed opportunity.
Online marketing on a suicide course
If you sell heat pumps, for example, YouTube or Alphabet now knows this because the content of your videos is about your heat pumps. And now it's getting particularly perfidious.
The Alphabet advertising technology now searches for your competitors who also sell heat pumps and have placed ads for them on YouTube, for example. And your prospective customers will now see these ads. Bingo.
Muck out
If you want to stop this, you have to remove all services from your website that seem to offer you a free service, turn you into a bona fide data thief and ruin you in the medium term:
These are among others: YouTube, Google Maps, Google recaptcha, Google server-hosted fonts.
You are looking for a replacement for YouTube - Get your starting credit now!
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