Dear readers & customers,
bit by bit we’re starting to remove all of our advertisments from our websites.
Firstly, we never made any revenue from these. We’re serious right here.
Secondly, we never were convinced that concepts such as “Google Adsense” or “Adshot” are here to suit small indie publishers.
Thirdly, the “DSGVO” is doing its thing to make it harder for us small publishers to support big advertisement corporations as these never did comply with EU regulations and thus their code snippets are illegal, buggy & not up to date.
Fourthly, but not least: these are too old concepts and are rests of a TV and radio era. We from AETHYX MEDIAE never supported that, by the way, and thus don’t think it will be too much of a hard step for us.
As we’re living and working remotely from anywhere on this planet in the 21. century, there are more agile and end-user friendly ways of supporting websites.
Following is a list of payment options we support.
From the beginning we supported “Flattr” for example, a Swedish microdonation service which started in 2010. Through this service alone a user/reader/fan can tip our websites in an instant.
All of our websites support “Bitcoin” since 2014, a decentralised cryptocurrency from 2008/2009 which will some day (with other derivates) take over traditional, state-backed currencies. We added a button on every website we built where a user receives our donation address by a simple click of this button. Keep in mind this protocol is not officially supported by the W3C (WorldWideWebConsortium) and thus is not working in every browser or smartphone. In this case just copy our Bitcoin address please from your browser address bar and make your donation.
It’s more easier using the “Ethereum” button, if you want to spend Ether: firstly we designed and implemented this button ourselves, find the project and source code here. Secondly you will be redirected to “Etherscan.io” directly and may use an official link or a QR barcode directly to make donations.
So far these will be our current, one and only future ways of making money out of our projects.
For small indie online publishers “Google Adsense”, etc. never were an useful option. Our most popular blog project for example, gizmeo.eu, accumulates 15 readers per day at the moment and thus it never, since 2010 as this medium started, accumulated any kind of valuable revenue. So f*** that! ^^
We are heavily dependent of donations and strongly advise you to donate if you read and/or use our websites, apps & source code repositories!
Please take into consideration: as an indie publisher we never may guarantee that a medium exists for long if no one is interested in it. To this date we did so much to develop the new media ecosphere further but never got anything back to make a living. As we’re also pretty long in this game, since 1999/2000, we don’t think this will be the future we may support any longer.
GRANDS. DON’T. COME. FOR. FREE.
Keep rollin’ & take care,
the aethyx staff
Dear readers,
it may sound like an unsexy topic but it’s an important one for sure: as of today, May 25th 2018, the EU law GDPR takes full effect.
This law was written down two years ago already and is primarly designed to fine corporations or institutions for a lot of money if these don’t comply to data protection standards.
What sounds like a good thing for the individual is a nightmare for small publishers or freelancers like us here at AETHYX MEDIAE.
Nevertheless we agree totally with the EU intentions and thus decided to implement special features for users to voluntarily opt-out of data collections services.
At AETHYX MEDIAE we are using the following services which use cookies and thus should all provide an opt-out possibility by default:
- Google Adsense: for targeted advertising on all of our commercial websites
- Adshot: an Adsense clone which we use for research purposes as well as an alternative to Google Adsense
- Matomo (formerly Piwik): for website analytics like where do our users come from, which browsers they use, etc.
We already published all of this information on our contact page for years: https://aethyx.eu/contact/
What’s new here is now an option to opt-out from Matomo, the website analytics, with a click of a checkbox.
For Google Adsense as well as Adshot we’re still missing this option. It’s not our fault, neither Google nor Adshot are currently able to provide a convenient opt-out option. The only thing we can do at the moment is to promise to implement this option when it will be made publicly available. We don’t think it will take very long as we are sure advertising agencies will know what lies ahead of them if they don’t comply.
All in all it’s definitely a good thing for the future of individual data rights. Some may curse the EU for these restrictions. We at AETHYX MEDIAE deeply believe that Europe did a great job in protecting human rights. It’s a pity there exists a panic at the moment when this law exists since April 2016 already. Thank your government if you feel uninformed here.
Thank you for using our sites and services.
Kindest regards,
the aethyx staff