Hacker News Reader

Comment by ElectronShak | Hacker News Reader

Accessing geo-restricted content is probably one of the reasons. A lot of VPN services use this line while advertising.

Accessing geo-restricted content is a minority of the VPN advertising that I come across. Most of the VPN marketing I see is a combination of "security and privacy", "online banking", "hackers", "private data", "snooping ISPs".

I've always thought it was like a smoke shop. They say their products are for tobacco but everyone knows what its really for. Same with VPN, they say it's for all those things above but accessing geo-restricted content seems like the real reason.

Well, if I see a list of "good privacy-focused VPNs" on like TorrentFreak, then I'm pretty sure that they mean "these VPNs are good to route your torrent traffic through". But I do actually doubt that people watching a video on YouTube are going to get the "watch Japanese Netflix on ButtVPN" subtext when the advertising blurp is "ButtVPN protects your online banking against hackers". It's not like it's actually illegally to promote a VPN for bypassing geoblocking, so if that was the main driver of customers, they'd really use it a lot more often.

They can't promise that because companies like Netflix constantly blacklist their IPs. They can make a general statement like "view geolocked content", but being specific and then not delivering will lead to a lot of resentment from new users.

Well it's either that or make every user an endpoint to go around the IP blacklist like that one provider did, but I can't remember which one.

They can't promise that but will explicitly advertise their VPN to work with Netflix.

https://www.expressvpn.com/vpn-service#streaming

They won't advertise that they can access geo-restricted content like Netflix because Netflix is constantly cracking down on VPN providers and blacklisting IPs. But it's definitely one of the bigger use cases.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com