Partners

There is nothing more annoying than irrelevant ads. However, in order to maintain a website and to deliver a top tier experience, websites usually need a way of generating an income and uou guessed it: most websites use advertisements as their primary way of income. Some of them really don’t care about user experience, because I often have a hard time reading or even finding the content between the ads.

The most used advertising platform is Google AdSense, which could possibly sound familiar if you have affinty with the YouTube creator scene. AdSense does indeed give the most revenue, but at the cost of the user experience and privacy.

Visitors should not be exposed to irrelevant ads, that’s why www.cloudfrl.com decided to go a different way.

Advertisements can be occassionally useful, but only if the ads are not based on your identity and activity. www.cloudfrl.com does not track your activity on this site nor on sites from other parties.

What would be more suitable for a website about technology than to show you offers/ads that could be potentially way more useful than a random fashion or holiday ad.

Instead of a generic platform like AdSense which is heavily personalizing your ads, www.cloudfrl.com only shows advertisements from carefully handpicked partners.

www.cloudfrl.com has full control of the ads on the website and aims for 100% transparancy . We partnered with multiple brands disclosed on this page, both directly and trough affiliate programs, CJ Partner, Impact Radius, Partnerize and Rakuten.

Our Partners

It gives full control, unlike platforms such as Google AdSense. Those platforms usually place ads that differ from user to user and is based on a profile that the advertising platform, for example Google, has already built from you. That profile is basically built from nearly all your browser activity or search activity, YouTube activity and whatsoever. Websites using Google AdSense which you visit will be included in that profile. Therefore it’s a common occurrence to see an ad with the best AMD Radeon deals right after you searched for a new GPU for example.

This is a violation of basic privacy in my opinion, because there is no such thing as ‘consent‘ for advertisements similar to the ’cookie consent.’ The JavaScript code for AdSense is usually already fired before the cookie consent tag is. (Both snippets live inside the HTML headtags of a website, but the order in which they are placed does have an effect on how to browser reads it). If ads were just as easy to turn off as non-essential cookies, I’m certain there would be way less websites or ’free’ services available online.

There are obviously different ways to deal with ads, like installing a browser plugin such as uBlock Origin. Adblockers are available for practically every browser on desktop and a select few browsers on Android, but if you’re using an Apple device (except for Mac) you are very much limited to either use SafarI exclusively or install a systemwide app. Relying on those apps is usually not really appreciated by your battery, since it actually deploys a loopback VPN to be able to check traffic for known domains on the blacklist. Checking a blacklist for a match is not a particularly intensive task, but remember that all your traffic has to go though that tunnel. Your phone makes hundreds of requests in the background that you’re completely unaware off. This includes connectivity checks, subscription checks, fetching new e-mail and messages, refreshing weather-data and it will even maintain a constant connection with the appserver if push notifications are turned on. Every single byte goes through it.

That’s why I think ad blockers are not the ideal solution, yet it is the most effective one. It is completely understandable that a visitor does not want to load anything a website wants him to. To be completely fair, even some of the services we use from third parties get blocked by most adblockers (even setting your browsers tracking prevention to most strict it will already be blocked). For example HotJar won't load anymore. That means we won't be able to receive feedback or automatic bug reports from every visitor, but on the other hand nobody gets hurt.

Most sites nowadays are not loaded but bloated with ads, which makes those websites actually less fun to visit. We also strongly believe this takes the attention awau from the actual content and drags it towards the advertisements. This actually sounds like a huge benefit for the income generated from the ads, but are you still passionate about the content you provide if that's your primary goal?

Income is definitely necessary for a website to grow and be maintained. However, it shouldn't be at the cost of the experience you provide to your visitors. An example of a website mastering the art of forcing you to pay for a subscription is YouTube. Watching any video on YouTube is truly a pain without a premium subscription. And it's not like it's reasonably priced either.

We provided various ways for visitors who can show their support by subscribing to our Patreon for example.