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Comment by ehsankia | Hacker News Reader

Honestly, I don't think it's exclusive to NordVPN, I've found that all VPN advertising has increased significantly in the last year or two. Noticeably, ExpressVPN is also everywhere. Almost every podcast or youtube video has some VPN ads in it. It seems like with the recent focus on privacy, they are really these two companies and others are really trying to make a run for it.

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Is VPN advertising increasing due to content restrictions from online streaming services?

If you travel overseas, you can't access Netflix, AmazonPrime Video, etc. so a VPN service allows you to still use your service while you're away from home.

And then sports streaming. You can sign up for a yearly subscription to watch sports, but not the teams closest to your physical location due to local blackouts.

Utah is in a terrible place too. No NFL, MLB, or NHL team. But the closest teams are all blacked out from streaming services.

I've found that using a VPN reduces my streaming ability. Using Private Internet Access in the past I was forbidden from watching anything on Netflix. Also I was forbidden from editing Wikipedia even on an old account with positive editing history.

Netflix (et al) are blacklisting some common VPN's IP ranges. If that fails, they use some DNS tricks to route the requests to your nearest geographical API and if there is a discrepancy between your IP's location and endpoint's location, they block the requests too. It is possible to overcome, but with some work.

Yeah tried to fool Disney+ and most things failed. Even routing through my own private VPS didn't work. They're definitely getting much better at it.

Maybe it's one of things where there's hundreds of "dedicated server providers" but really it's all the same thing just rebranded/resold, sometimes under one entity[0]. I've seen this rebrand/resell behavior with proxy services, people search engines, etc. I don't know much about VPN providers but I'm guessing they share or pipe into each other since there's so many of them.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Endurance_International_Grou...

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