Questions regarding the "Impressum" are quite frequent, therefore we created this article to answer the most common questions.

Table of contents

What is an Impressum?

An Impressum is essentially a statement of ownership and authorship. It was put into place in an effort to protect user data, combat illegal content and spam by making website owners identify themselves, and as a result assume responsibility for the content on their platform.

Often when talking about an Impressum, people mean the German (DACH) version of compulsory information placed on a website.

Is an Impressum legally required?

The Impressum is legally required on all commercial websites (including Facebook business pages) published in German-speaking countries (Germany, Austria, and Switzerland), whether the website is published via a .de top-level domain or not.

The point can be made that if you simply have a personal blog without ads and make no money from it, then the Impressum is not required.

The Privacy Policy and the Impressum

Often we are asked why the certain informations necessary for the Impressum can't simply be added within the privacy policy. These are our answers:

• We believe that an Impressum should be a standalone page containing just the information about the Impressum; this makes the information easier to digest.
• Also a standalone page is going to be indexed and will be generally easier to find and thus fulfills several requirements that are demanded of this document. More about this below.
• if you’d like to include it, however, we make it easy for you to add. You can add all the required information under the Website owner field inside the privacy policy:

What do I put in an impressum?

Generally, an Impressum should contain the following information:

• Name of the website owner (a business name is usually used here)
• Registered address (please note that a PO Box – Postfach – is not considered to be a valid registered address as the owners can not typically be found there)
• Valid contact information – phone number, fax or email address
• If an activity needs official authorization, information about the supervising authority
• Name of the individual legal representative (typically the owner of the website or the person managing the site)