What are cookies?

Cookies are small text files which a website may place on your computer or device when you visit a site. The cookie will help the website, or another website, to recognise your device the next time you visit. Web beacons, pixels or other similar files can also do the same thing. We use the term "cookies" in this policy to refer to all files that collect information in this way.

Cookies serve many functions. For example, they can help us to remember your username and preferences, analyse how well our Sites are performing, or allow us to recommend content we believe will be most relevant to you.

The majority of websites use cookies to collect and retain personal information about their visitors. Most cookies collect general information, such as how visitors arrive at and use our Sites, the device they are using, their internet protocol address (IP address), what pages they are viewing and their approximate location (for example, we would be able to recognise that you are visiting our Sites from London).

Purpose of cookies

We group our cookies into the below categories.

Operating our Sites

Some cookies are essential for the operation of our Sites. This includes cookies for the following purposes:

• Access - we use these cookies to identify registered users and ensure access to pages behind the registration wall.
• Performance - we use these cookies to monitor Site performance. This allows us to provide a high quality experience by quickly identifying and fixing any issues that arise. For example, we might use performance cookies to track error messages, and to determine improvements to our Sites.
• Functionality - we use functionality cookies to allow us to remember your preferences. For example, we use functionality cookies to provide you with enhanced services, such as allowing you to watch a video online or comment on a blog.
• Analytics - we use cookies to help us understand our audience and the success of advertising campaigns. For example, we count posts views to present 'Most Read' content. We also use analytics cookies to keep track of how many advertising impressions have been served for a campaign and to manage the frequency at which you see the same adverts.
• Fraud prevention - we use cookies to monitor and prevent suspicious activity and fraudulent traffic.

Advertising

We use cookies to serve you with advertisements that we believe are relevant to you and your interests. You may see these advertisements on our Sites and on other sites that you visit. For example, if you read a number of posts on 2D animation on fudgeanimation.com or on other sites, you would see 2D animation advertisements as we have inferred that you are interested in this topic.

If you reject cookies, you may continue to see "contextual" advertisements that are not targeted based on your personal information - for example, a 2D animation advertisement presented on a 2D animation post.

Third party cookies on our Sites

We also use third party cookies on our Sites that fall into the categories above ("third party cookies") for the following reasons:

• to help us monitor traffic on our Sites (like many companies, we use Google Analytics to do this);
• to identify fraudulent or non-human traffic;
• to assist with market research;
• to improve Site functionality;
• to monitor compliance with our terms and conditions and copyright policy.

Use of pixels in emails

Our emails often contain a single, campaign-unique "web beacon pixels" to tell us whether, and how many times, our emails are opened and verify any clicks through to links or advertisements within the email. We use this information for purposes including:

• Determining which of our emails are more interesting to users;
• Determining users' activity and engagement with our products and services;
• Informing our advertisers (in aggregate) how many users have clicked on their advertisements.

Changes to this Cookie Policy

This policy is effective from 16/12/2018.

Any changes we may make to this cookie policy will be posted on this page. If changes are significant, we may choose to notify you by email or to clearly indicate on our home page that the policy has been updated.