Is it a case of "winners take all", with smaller players having little revenue and profit? But then again, everyone seems to offer their own vpn now (adguard, blokada, protonmail, etc). Is it just profitable if you offer a bare minimum, almost white labeled service?
(I guess I have always wondered how and why VPN offering seem to have exploded recently, and how tons of them seem to be able to afford lavish ad spend even with little VC money)
Consumer VPN industry is a shit show, especially in the last 3-5 years. The parasitic "VPN review" industry is making all the money, as the "big VPNs" are paying ridiculously high CPA rates (think gambling CPA rates of $50-$100). Most "review" sites rank VPNs based on a single metric - who pays the most. This is why vpnmentor (a review site) was acquired for more money than PrivateInternetAccess (a "major VPN). Hilariously, by the same company, Kape technologies which used used to make adware (as Crossrider), and then decided to go all in on "privacy".
Then there are influencers and Youtubers, all of them peddling VPNs of the highest bidder, reading off a script and making impossible / bullshit claims about capabilities of VPNs. This outright causes harm to the industry.
VPNs that don't participate in these BS schemes (or can't pay $100/signup, and wait for ROI 3 years later), have only 1 way to grow: word of mouth, based on the merits of the product. This is very difficult to do given the massive ad spend of the "big VPNs", and false advertising they engage in.
Don't even get me started on the consolidation.... https://blog.windscribe.com/consolidation-of-the-vpn-industr...
We kind of got lumped into the VPN segment back in the day, despite being a hardware product. The cutthroat nature of the existing media agreements (NordVPN and Express VPN mainly) along with the sky high CPMs they were paying made it impossible for us to acquire customers and keep them long enough to pay our bills.
Pretty smart tactic... if you're them. Quite bad for the consumer though.
The founder was really open about it. And back then hosting had ~$100 CPA and we had instances where we wouldn't turn a profit on a customer who purchased a shared hosting account UNLESS they renewed after 2 years given the cost to acquire.
To this day, when I see lists reviewing services providers, I'm always skeptical of them and steer away from letting them influence my decision on a service provider.
I have no way of knowing with anything approaching confidence which ones are decent and which ones aren't.
What say you about Mullvad?
Mullvad, it performs well and I feel that the ability to pay cash/crypto, the lack of subscription both are tangible signals that they are real about anonymity.
Proton, with their Secure Core features is pretty nifty and I like that they have other products that shoehorn into "getting away from being spied on" by providing mail/calendar/drive storage as an alternative to Google. Their drive product could use some work but overall I'm really happy to pay $10/mo for VPN+custom domain mail+500GB of available cold storage.
Thanks for the background on the industry.
I thought this kind of thing didn't happen so much with VPNs as their target market is pretty technical and I would expect those people not to fall for 'review' or comparison site scams.
Clearly I was completely wrong. I'm sorry to hear your industry is basically being blackmailed by these scammers (I consider a site pretending to give advice or comparisons but instead offering the highest bidder a total scam)
Highly agree with this statement.
That's why from my experience of using PIA, windscribe, keepsolid, Nord and mullvad.
I keep recommending mullvad VPN to collegues, acquittances and online friend (on a down side their IP reputation sucks badly, too much of captchas)
Consolidation is an attempt to bring those costs down by reducing the number of players bidding for customers.
They also paid as much as several of these put together for the marketing/affiliate websites Webselence, VPNmentor, Safety Detectives. Which shows how much money must be in these affiliate programs.
Though it's anyone's guess what has happened as service over time had deteriorated quite drastically.
This is entirely conspiracy theory, but I suspect state sponsorship.
Looking at our access logs over the same amount of time, we'd have our domestic users doing normal things, and then oddball traffic from Russia and China (and wherever else) trying to bruteforce credentials and probe for vulnerabilities.
Then we started seeing our domestic users logging in from oddball places ("Bob doesn't live or work in ___..."), and these would turn out to be legit-- they'd be using ExpressVPN or whatever. Not ideal, but ok.
But the vulnerability scans and spray-and-prays stopped coming in from foreign countries, and started coming in from known VPN ASNs-- the same ones as our legit users coming in from the same sources. While there used to be some divide between the really scummy providers and the more-sortof-legit ones, this problem has gotten even worse as these services consolidate. Now everybody's coming in from something M247-owned and that's that.
These days, enough of our users have been enticed by the promises of the VPN industry that we can't really tell who's who anymore based on IP address, and the same thing is starting to happen with useragents and mail clients. I suspect a lot of our users are simply handing over credentials to foreign agencies running some of these apps at this point. Then said agency logs in over the VPN whenever they please and we don't even notice because they're coming in from the same location as the user themselves-- there's just no such thing as "normal" anymore.
We can't ban the VPNs because inevitably some exec who thinks VPN will prevent his spouse from discovering his Grindr account will complain that he can't connect anymore, so it all gets enabled again.
Again, conspiracy theory, but if I were a state agency, normalizing abnormal behavior is what I'd do.
I'd have thought that maintaining infrastructure would be kind of a pain. You need to have outgoing access points all over the place. I assume that they mostly just rent them, but still, that's just a bunch of egress fees. And I'm sure that their customers love to stream movies through their VPN.
I suppose the fact that I hear about VPNs mostly through commercials means that the margins must be high, or they wouldn't spend so much on acquisition. But it seems like an unpleasant business to be in, with a lot of overhead and customer handholding.
WeVPN indirectly approached us to "make their users whole" for the time that they had paid for. In the spirit of collaboration, and not further tainting the already murky image of the consumer VPN industry, we decided to comp every WeVPN users with free service for the duration of their remaining subscription.
This is a goodwill gesture only, we're not engaged in any official partnership with WeVPN, and are/were not affiliated with them in any way.
Which isn't bad, but it isn't just goodwill.
I recommend just trying it for yourself, there is free service available. Choose Wireguard as the protocol, and try the closest geographic location to you.
However the RSA portion only applies to OpenVPN, and for compatibility reasons. Use WG (our default protocol) if you want modern algos and high throughput.
The cache for their "about us" section [0]:
Jonathan Roudier
Founder
VPN Experience: 8 years
Jon has nearly a decade of working in the VPN industry originally in Marketing and later in leadership and senior management. With his years of insight and customer knowledge gained from running Private Internet Access®, one of the world's biggest VPN providers, Jon decided to build his own VPN to ensure that the moral and ethics which he holds true are upheld and to provide an industry leader in transparency and accountability. Outside of WeVPN, He enjoys spending time at the gym and watching movies.
Private Internet Access President Jon Roudier
Jonathan Roudier, CEO of PIA, said “We, at Private Internet Access, are so thrilled..."
0: https://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:LVfIvHK77E4J:https://wevpn.com/about-us&cd=2&hl=es&ct=clnk&gl=es
1: https://www.privateinternetaccess.com/blog/private-internet-access-london-trust-media-acquired-cypherpunk-vpn/
2: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20151221005130/en/Private-Internet-Access-Top-Mobile-Sponsor-2016Seems in the spirit of their own values!
Source: I'm a Windscribe co-founder.
The transition was seamless.