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Comment by Lutger | Hacker News Reader

I believe ads work by making a brand name familiar, which helps you recognize it in the sea of information. And that makes it automatically somewhat more attractive and reputably. You can be entirely unaware of this and it still works.

Maybe the ad is not what convinced you, not at all, but it did prompt you to wonder if this LaunchDarkly thing is any good. Youtube kept spamming it in your face and you kept ignoring it, but of course the name stuck and now there are talking about it on HN so you decide to read "that" thread and not the other one about unleash or something you never heard of.

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Yes, but it can work in the opposite direction as well.

Eg, all the Youtube ads of NordVPN only did was to convince me that if I'm ever in the market, I'll use someone else. Part because all that advertising has to cost a lot of money, which of course the subscription has to pay for. Part because some of their advertising is less than completely honest about what they provide.

Sure but for every person like you there's several people who are not knowledgable about VPNs and use NordVPN because it's the one thing they heard about the most.

And an absolute truckload of people deep in the para-social relationship who couldn't imagine their 'friend' steering them wrong on a product, intentionally or otherwise

Tom Scott is a good example of the influence of VPN money. He made an entire video about how and why he would not make ads for VPNs because VPN ads are deceptive, this video got millions of views ...and then later he started making ads for VPNs (NordVPN iirc). I always wonder how much they bought him for.

Pretty sure he made a video about him doing those ads when he did them to answer that question, but you kind of answer it in your description anyway. His objection to VPN ads wasn't the fact it was a VPN, but the deceptive content in the ads. Promises they don't deliver, benefits you get from basic SSL anyway etc.

When a VPN was happy to work with him on an ad that wasn't deceptive or misleading he was happy to run it. I think the original video only existed in the first place because at that time he was willing to advertise a VPN for the money offered, but they couldn't agree on ad content he felt was fair. So his price never changed, the VPN company just gave into his 'advertise honestly' demand.

I believe the economics of VPN companies is that they have a quite inexpensive, commodity product which has a lot of churn. The ads get people to sign up for a month or two at any price, which pays for the cost of the ads.

Tom Scott’s video a few years ago helped, but some creators still seem to be saying or implying that using a VPN makes your browsing “safer,” which unless you have a very specific need for a certain kind of safety, is untrue. I wish VPN companies would audit the claims their partners are making about them, but there really isn’t an incentive to do so —- if their brand gets damaged irreparably they can release a new VPN under a different brand.

In the vast majority of cases, these creators are only taking slight liberties with talking points provided by the advertiser.

If basically every NordVPN ad on YouTube is talking about safety, you can be fairly confident that it was a talking point provided by NordVPN.

Nordvpn seemed like a decent choice for streaming bbc but I won’t use them because of a company advertises that hard it must be bad. I would never trust them for privacy they are too big

thr notdvpn ads may have enlarged the consumer market for vpns as well, which may benefit other vpns like mullvad (people that never heard about vpns are convinced by the ad that vpns are needed, searches more on google or reddit and end up selecting what is considered the "most private" one, that is, not nordvpn)

Apparently VPNs are stupidly high margins so the more lemmings to convert, the more pockets lined.

There did not seem to be a lot of lower cost options for watching bbc they all cost about the same dispite high margins

Indeed, you remember the brand, but forget how you got to know it. So even though you learned about something through ads, and you hate ads, eventually you'll forget that it was ads that put it in your brain, but you'll still remember the brand.

That's why I call ads psychological violence. They force themselves in your brain and there's nothing you can do against it

We need a worst offenders list so that every day we can look at the list and make a point to share something true and embarrassing about a company on it

That way it won't be:

> nothing you can do

Then we'll have pretty retribution, which is the first step towards tit-for-tat style cooperation.

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