ADVERTISING POLICY
We make our money through online advertising – which makes this site free for you to use. We’re not trying to pull a fast one or rip you off, but our ads keep us online, so we’ve adopted an advertising policy that works best for us and for you. If you have any questions, please contact us.
1) We will not sell your personal details onto a third party – advertisers on our site may have access to your behaviour via cookies, but not your data.
2) We place ads based on where they perform best – if a page happens to sell lots of computer games, we will advertise more computer games on that page. That’s reasonable right?
3) We will not use behavioural targeting unreasonably – if you go to a site about K-pop we will assume you are interested in K-pop merch. It’s not a sinister action, it just makes sense. You don’t have to buy the K-pop merch any more than you have to buy anything else! We won’t behaviourally target anything that might embarrass you, and you always have the option to opt out.
4) We request that you don’t use ad blockers – contrary to popular belief we do sometimes get paid for you just seeing advertising without you clicking or buying anything. If you like our site, please don’t block our ads – it’s an easy way for you to pay us for using it without it costing you anything.
5) We run ads through AdSense therefore it’s not always possible to keep track of the content they fill our ad spaces with. We do not allow advertising containing; adult content, gambling, alcohol. If you have a complaint about an ad for any reason, or one of these subjects has slipped the net, please get in touch with us and let us know and we will do our best to resolve it – it’s not in our interests to upset our audience.* (Note: Though we do not allow ads containing alcohol, we will occasionally produce content that includes mention of/use of alcohol. These are all appropriately labeled and contain a DrinkAware disclaimer.)
6) We do not allow auto-initiated sound – that means ads are not allowed to have the sound switched on when the page loads. If you see an ad which does this, please let us know and we will hunt it down and switch it off as soon as possible – we hate sound ads too!*
7) We do not allow ads which make you download anything (especially viruses!), or which break the site in anyway. If you see an ad which does this, please let us know and we will remove it as soon as possible.*
8) From time to time we produce sponsored articles, where possible we will tag these as ‘ad’ or ‘sponsored’. However, there are instances in which an advertiser specifically requests that an article is not labeled. As we are required to make it clear that an article is sponsored, all sponsored/paid for articles will always be listed as guest articles. If you are unclear on whether an article is sponsored or not, you may request information from us at any time. We pride ourselves on being transparent.
9) Occasionally we will produce House Ads for our products and services and will display these in our usual ad spots. These don’t make us any money, but help us promote what we do. This doesn’t affect anything for you, our readers. We would just like to make clear what we will advertise on our website.
* To help us find the offending ad, please send us a screenshot of the ad, the URL you saw it on and what country you are in if possible. So you know, we will also likely tell off the advertiser, as all of our advertising partners know our rules.
COOKIES POLICY
What are cookies?
Cookies are the confusingly adorably named tiny text files that can be placed on your computer or mobile device that uniquely (but anonymously) identify your browser or device. They are unable to search your computer in any way, cannot introduce viruses to your computer and contain no personal identifying information about you (basically they are nothing to be afraid of).
What are cookies used for?
Cookies are used by sites or services when they wants to know if your computer or device has visited that site or service before. These cookies on your computer or device can then be used to help remember your preferences (such as language), help you navigate between pages efficiently, and generally improve your browsing experience.
Similarly cookies are used by web publishers to help understand how their site or service is being used. Services such as Google Analytics use cookies to provide anonymous aggregated data such as how long users in general spent on the site, how many pages they visited and in which order etc.
Cookies can also be used for online advertising – by aggregating the very basic information cookies gather, informed guesses can be made about your demographic and ads targeted to you thusly. Or more simply – if you go to a site about watches, it may drop a cookie on your computer, so the next sites you go to will then contain ads about watches.
What types of cookies does UnitedKpop use?
There are generally four categories of cookies: “Strictly Necessary,” “Performance,” “Functionality,” and “Targeting.” UnitedKpop routinely uses three of these types of cookie: “Strictly Necessary,” “Performance,” and “Targeting.”
Here is some information about each cookie category:
- Strictly Necessary Cookies. These cookies are essential, as they enable you to move around UnitedKpop and use its features. For example – the cookie to say you have/have not allowed cookies to be used on this site.
- Performance Cookies. These cookies collect information about how you have used UnitedKpop, for example Google Analytics, which is used to track basic user behaviour on this site so we can try and improve our users experience.
- Targeting Cookies. Our advertising partners or other third party partners may use these types of cookies to deliver advertising that is relevant to your interests. These cookies can remember that your device has visited a site or service, and may also be able to track your device’s browsing activity on other sites or services other than UnitedKpop. This information may be shared with organizations outside UnitedKpop, such as advertisers and/or advertising networks to deliver the advertising, and to help measure the effectiveness of an advertising campaign, or other business partners for the purpose of providing aggregate Service usage statistics and aggregate Service testing.
- Functionality Cookies. UnitedKpop do not use this type of cookies, but just so you know: these cookies allow sites/services to remember how you’re logged in, when you logged in or out, and possibly anything you’ve done on a site while logged in. The information these cookies collect may be anonymous, and they are not used to track your browsing activity on other sites or services.
How long will cookies stay on my device?
The amount of time a cookie stays on your device is variable: the majority of cookies expire after the end of your browsing session– others persist for longer. In online advertising you can generally expect most advertising cookies to last about one month at most (although again it varies).
First and third party cookies
First-party cookies are cookies that belong to UnitedKpop, third-party cookies are cookies that another party places on your device through our site. Third-party cookies may be placed on your device by someone providing a service for UnitedKpop, for example to help us understand how our service is being used. Third-party cookies may also be placed on your device by our business partners so that they can use them to advertise products and services to you elsewhere on the Internet.
How to control and delete cookies
Most web browsers allow some control of most cookies through the browser settings. To find out more about cookies, including how to see what cookies have been set and how to manage and delete them, visit www.aboutcookies.org or www.allaboutcookies.org.
There is also type of cookie called a “Flash Cookie” which is not covered by the above – to delete these go here: http://www.adobe.com/support/documentation/en/flashplayer/help/settings_manager07.html