When every click of the mouse 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. But you spend the money, and your prospects become your competitors' customers. Your sales shrink, your costs rise, and you finance your competitors' success.
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 costs nothing, it is also free. In fact, "if something is free, you are the product.
Youtube wants the data of your users
You know that with videos you can enhance your website enormously and keep your visitors better informed and longer. That's why you upload your videos to YouTube and add the links to your website. This is quick and easy. You don't have to pay anything. How convenient.
The trap has now snapped shut and YouTube, which belongs to Alphabet like Google, is ringing the cash registers. First of all, you agreed, among other things, that YouTube now has the rights to your videos. You've agreed that YouTube can monetize your videos. That they can resell the data, etc. And they do, with your help:
Figure: The video is over and new videos are suggested to your visitor. The goal: to keep the user as long as possible to show him 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. It 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 almost every second the viewer's behavior is reported to YouTube. This process is also called tracking.
As I said, with each individual call. YouTube stores this data for life and thus refines the profile of your user. Since your visitor is on the Internet, every single action leaves traces. Alphabet offers these services only to get the data of your users. Many website operators don't know any better and fall for it.
They use, for example, the letters (fonts) of Google or the map service Google Maps. The call of the page is enough and the data is collected and stored. And this data is worth its weight in gold.
Fig.: Because of the GDPR, a Consent Banner is mandatory for embedded Youtube videos. Many users reject it. The result: the video remains unseen. Opportunity lost.
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 gets particularly perfidious.
Alphabet's advertising technology now searches for your competitors who also sell heat pumps and have placed ads for them on YouTube, for example. And your prospects 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, make you a bona fide data stealer and ruin you in the medium term:
These include: YouTube, Google Maps, Google recaptcha, Google server-hosted fonts.
You're looking for a replacement for YouTube - Get your startup credit now!
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