Kevy Metal’s Privacy Policy

Kevy Metal does not collect any personal data from visitors whatsoever. That is why as of today (September 4th, 2024), I never considered the necessity of a privacy policy on my website. However, since I have been experimenting with affiliate marketing a little to cover the costs of running the site, one of the affiliate programs has brought to my attention that it is necessary to have an easily accessible privacy policy on the site.

This could have been a page full of legalese, but instead, let me give you total transparency of what data I have access to, what affiliate programs the site is a part of, and what data I have access to as part of those affiliate programs. A short explanation of what affiliate programs are, and how they work, might be in order as well, as they could help you understand what data is shared and how it is handled.

What WordPress Data Can Kevy Metal Access?

Kevy Metal is a WordPress site. The first time you visited the site, you have likely been greeted by a cookie wall courtesy of WordPress, allowing you to opt out of all the non-functional cookies the platform uses if you would like to. Please keep in mind that whatever you choose, Kevy Metal is not the party handling your cookies; WordPress is.

What WordPress does do is give insights into certain statistics of people visiting the site. These give me a general impression of the people visiting the site, but they are anonymized to a significant degree. Here are all the visitor statistics I have access to:

  • Countries: The statistics show the number of views per country for both the site and the e-mails sent to my subscribers. Note that this concerns the number of views and not the number of visitors.
  • Referrers: If you reached Kevy Metal by clicking a link on a different website, the statistics show what domain or social medium the visitor has come from. The statistics do not show specific pages and they are not tied to the country statistics. So for example: I can see that a visit to my site is the result of a click in Google, on Facebook, or on Wikipedia, but I cannot see the specific page on which you clicked the link or the search terms you used.
  • Clicks: If you have clicked a link to an external website on Kevy Metal, such as an affiliate link or a link to an artist’s website or Bandcamp page, it will be visible in my statistics. While these pages do show specific URL’s, they are not tied to any of the other statistics I can access. So I cannot see from which country a visitor who clicked such a link is, or which medium referred them to Kevy Metal. Interestingly, I can also not see how many times links to other pages within Kevy Metal have been clicked.
  • Emails: Those who subscribed to Kevy Metal will receive an e-mail with the full post every time something is published. The statistics show how often an e-mail has been opened, and how often it has been accessed on the site by clicking something in the e-mail. When I click any of the e-mails, the statistics show the countries, the e-mail clients and the operating systems of those who opened them. Experiments have shown these statistics aren’t perfect, however, as a Dutch friend of mine opens them nearly every time and is able to quote them literally, but the Netherlands barely ever show up in the statistics.
  • Search terms: Depending on your privacy settings, I may be able to see which search terms you used if you visited Kevy Metal by clicking on a link in a search engine, though not which search engine you used. This could be invaluable information to a marketing department, but since Kevy Metal doesn’t sell anything, I tend to ignore these statistics entirely. Not much shows up there these days anyway, because most people’s privacy settings these days are strict enough to block search term statistics from being visible to me, which in all honesty is what I would recommend to begin with.
  • File downloads: If you click a media file on any Kevy Metal article, the statistics will show it has been downloaded, but no user information is available to me. In Kevy Metal’s case, these are the photos in the articles almost exclusively, in which case I would say: go ahead, but please make sure to credit the photographer if I have done so too if you use the photo elsewhere.
  • Subscribers: If you subscribe to Kevy Metal, the database I can access contains your username, the e-mail address you used to subscribe, the country you have subscribed from, how many e-mails you have received from Kevy Metal, what percentage of them you have opened, and what percentage of them you have clicked on in order to access the Kevy Metal website. As far as I can tell, these statistics go back about a year.

Please keep in mind that this list of statistics I have access to is only there to provide transparency of what data I, as the only person who runs Kevy Metal, have access to. Other WordPress packages may provide other details, such as anonymized data on the devices people use to view certain sites. Such statistics are not part of the WordPress package Kevy Metal runs on.

What Is Affiliate Marketing?

Affiliate marketing is essentially a form of advertising, in which a website or blog publishes links to products or other pages of a webshop in their content, in exchange for a small commission on the order made after clicking the link. In this case, Kevy Metal has started publishing links to the works of certain artists at the bottom of reviews and interviews. This is a fairly interesting way to advertise for many vendors, as they basically have no costs up-front and such advertisements tend to have high conversion rates. In layman’s terms: a relatively large amount of clicks results in actual orders. Here’s how it may look:

One difficulty for me was to pick out the right affiliate partners. After all, I live in the Netherlands, but the country that attracts most visitors is by far the United States, and I have very little knowledge of the American physical music media market. At the time of writing, I am still in the middle of experimenting and researching the possibilities of affiliate marketing for Kevy Metal, so whatever I will write about the details of my partnerships may be subject to change.

However, I want to be as transparent as possible when it concerns the companies I work with and what their policies on handling personal data are. Please note that I read all their terms and conditions extensively, and I would not be working with any of these companies if I distrusted them.

Kevy Metal’s Affiliate Programs

To start with, I decided to work with a European company, a North American company and a company that sells Japanese music internationally, but North America has been put on hold due to some unforeseen difficulties. Currently, I work with the following companies, though I have written this early enough in the process to not have a single sale to my name yet:

  • CDJapan: CD Japan was a no-brainer for me for multiple reasons. First off, I order cd’s and dvd’s from CDJapan myself fairly regularly, and I am aware of the many shipping options they offer to nearly every country in the world. Their affiliate program is also very simple and convenient. If you click a CDJapan affiliate link on the site and order something, all I can see is the number of clicks, the number of orders and the cumulative order total for the month. No personal data will be available to me. You can review the CDJapan Affiliate Program Terms of Service I have to abide by right here.