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Comment by infogulch | Hacker News Reader

Very interesting! I'm curious why there is there is a typical relationship between vpn companies and media companies, by common subsidiary ownership or otherwise. I don't really follow the logic here, is it just because the media company can promote their partnered vpn? Or is there some other reason?

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It is /exactly/ because the media company can promote its partnered VPN. A huge driver of user signups in the commodity personal VPN space is affiliate referrals, and usually those affiliate sites are "review" or "how-to" sites. While the affiliate relationship is usually stated, it implies that the site makes money off the referral. In a lot of cases, the site actually makes its money by preferred placement of the VPN provider on their site. A VPN company often even writes or edits the content for the site.

If you're a VPN company, it's actually cheaper for you to own the sites and populate them with your own product than it is to pay a site for placement, especially if you own four or five VPN brands. Heck, sometimes, they don't even acquire sites. They just start them and spend money to get them to rank well.

I don't trust review sites in general (even if they don't contain paid recommendations, they still rank by which affiliate will net them more money), but I /really/ don't trust sites that cover or rank VPN providers. Personal VPNs as they are pitched to consumers are just shy of snake-oil, and almost all the content written that touts them is revenue driven.

Background: I previously helped start and worked for a VPN provider.

Affiliate campaigns! So basically you'll see in review articles for everything a link with a ton of fluff and tracking in it.

Say you want a new pair of headphones. You'll probably do something like this.

1. Search Google & look for forum/reddit threads talking about specific brands.

2. Look for those brands for further reviews, feedback, and price comparisons.

3. You will come across a review that has links to the "best price".

4. By clicking that link if you purchase that product then, or within 15-30 days (depends on the affiliate agreement) the affiliate will earn commission.

That's why big corps work with media companies. They make hundreds of thousands per month via affiliate commissions alone.

This induces a large amount of biases as media sites always recommend their affiliates over non-affiliates.

This is a major reason why I don't do affiliate links outside of Amazon for anything I mention (I add tracking links sometimes if a company sponsors a video and requests I use one of their tracked URLs, but I won't do affiliate links for any entity I work with). It creates perverse incentives, especially if one of the services generates a lot of revenue for a channel/publication.

If there's a relationship with a vendor—especially in articles that review and compare different services—it should be obvious what that relationship is. Online tech publications and review websites are some of the worst offenders these days.

VPNmentor, a VPN review site, was acquired by Kape "Technologies" for 150M.

PrivateInternetAccess, a major VPN service was acquired by the same company for 95M.

A VPN review site is worth more than most VPN services it promotes due to insane $CPA they pay to these types of sites, that masquerade as "security exports" while in reality ran by marketing people.

Look at their staff: https://www.vpnmentor.com/about-us/

Every "favorite" VPN is a property they own, except for the sole NordVPN guy.

there isn't that much technical differentiation. If you have a hundred companies selling the same commoditized service the only way for you to make any money is through some sort of brand or customer acquisition. On a pure product case VPN providers have essentially competed each other to the cost of production.

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