8 ms·

Investigating Influencer VPN Ads on YouTube [pdf]

123 points by zdw 5y ago

zelon88 5y ago
How to make me doubt your credibility in one easy step? Hawk VPN products in your YouTube video. I will automatically know you are an idiot.
- tambeb 5y ago
  I've seen Sabine Hossenfelder do a few NordVPN ads in her videos and I don't think she's an idiot. To be clear though, this isn't a judgement about VPNs or me saying I trust her and so I'll buy that VPN. It's more that as long as the product isn't something too crazy, most content producers will probably happily take the ad money because they need to eat. While on the topic of NordVPN... a few months ago I was looking to get a little bit of podcast marketing going for my project and spoke to the person responsible for ads on a comedian podcast I like. It's one that is pretty small and would've been affordable for a small operation like mine, but it turned out that NordVPN was already in negotiations to buy out the next year of ads and that was that.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
edgyquant 5y ago
My biggest issue is they always go with the claim you can watch Netflix etc from other countries but I can’t even watch Netflix for my own country with Express or Nord VPN as it detects them and won’t allow it. These are the two most advertised VPNs and it’s blatantly false advertisement.
- CraneWorm 5y ago
  It's a mixed bag, the so-called "obfuscated servers" can sometimes allow you to watch region-locked content on Netflix. But they (Netflix) are definitely trying to combat these attempts and you can get cut off in the middle of the movie... Pirates offer a superior service every time, until this is solved nothing will change.
  - truemotive 5y ago
    region locks are such an absurd leftover from the entertainment industry, and likely at least in part because they’re not going to improve the systems they put in place to hypercharge folks based on country/local market effects, etc. Really all I have to say it’s just stupid to have them in the streaming age unless you’re pulling in the checks.
rainbowzootsuit 5y ago
I use sponsorblock now and my exposure to VPN ads has fallen to approximately zero, as it is meant to be.
walrus01 5y ago
Missed opportunity for a humorous notification at the top of the PDF: "THIS RESEARCH REPORT BROUGHT TO YOU BY RAID SHADOW LEGENDS"
- smoldesu 5y ago
  "Audio version of this research paper available for the hearing-impaired, brought to you by Raycon and Auidble. Get 30% off your next pair of earbuds, and your next 3 audiobooks on us with code SELLOUT"
Ansil849 5y ago
So in layman's terms: "we looked at a bunch of ads, and found that a bunch of them are making bullshit claims". I mean yeah....that is what advertising is: exaggerated, nebulous, or otherwise evasive if not outright false claims.
- heresie-dabord 5y ago
  I'll say in the defence of advertising that it doesn't need to be a pack of lies. There are countries where it is illegal to publish false information. That said, Y*tube is not to be trusted as a source of information. When people mistake entertainment for democracy, they are living in Plato's cave.
- dboreham 5y ago
  This may be accepted in US culture, but it's not the norm everywhere. Many countries have a culture that advertising should be truthful and not deceptive, backed up by laws and enforcement. e.g. https://www.asa.org.uk/ https://www.asa.org.uk/
  - Ansil849 5y ago
    > Many countries have a culture that advertising should be truthful and not deceptive Truthful advertising is an oxymoron, like saying 'peaceful wars'. The only difference in sectors where there is ostensibly more regulation is that the lies are not something concrete like hard figures, but more abstract, like creating the illusion that a product will bring happiness.
    - dboreham 5y ago
      It's a spectrum, right. You could make an ad that says "Acetaminophen cures headache symptoms for most people and has minimal side-effects. Don't take a ton of it because then you'll die". That would still increase sales of the drug and I think it's entirely truthful.
- jbothma 5y ago
  They don't. I hear the same overstatement of what vpns will provide in terms of security from non-technical and sometimes technical people. Somewhere these misrepresentations are being taken as fact.
Brajeshwar 5y ago
What VPN Providers do you suggest? I would not like to "just" fire up a digitalocean, AWS or a Raspberry pi. Something reliable enough for a daily driver, no-logging, and a speedier experience from a user in a corner in India. I have used ExpressVPN but then they exited. I had the opportunity to used ClearVPN for a while, OK but too many bells and whistles. I think I also got IVACY in some discount sale for 5-years. This one just kinda works and I might actually stick to this if nothing bad happens. I had had tried Mullvad for a few months but was slow from India (2020-ish). I'm not worried and am not hiding anything from any country's 3-letter institutes. However, I like have one handy that I can go in as my bubble to feel comfortable in.
- causi 5y ago
  Depends on your use case. If it's piracy I would stick to services that have been subpoenaed and produced no records.
- clsec 5y ago
  IMO Restore Privacy [1] is a reliable source for VPN recommendations. For what it's worth, I use Surfshark and am very happy with them (except the lack of a kill switch in the CLI app and the lack of a Linux GUI client). [1] https://restoreprivacy.com/ https://restoreprivacy.com/ edit: typo
- k8sToGo 5y ago
  Mullvad is the go to one at the moment. Maybe try it again?
- alexb_ 5y ago
  Seconding Mullvad, but I'm in the US and not India so it might be different.
- dgellow 5y ago
  I already trust ProtonMail with my emails, so started using ProtonVPN when I have a need for one. They have wireguard support now.
- scim-knox-twox 5y ago
jrmann100 5y ago
Tom Scott did a great analysis and interpretation of what an honest VPN ad might look like: https://youtu.be/WVDQEoe6ZWY https://youtu.be/WVDQEoe6ZWY
- willis936 5y ago
  And lost his VPN ad deals. There was no better way to confirm his narrative than to pull out.
  - devortel 5y ago
    I don't think Tom Scott ever promoted a VPN product in a YouTube video. He's actually quite selective with his brand deals. From his contact page regarding ads: * If you're asking about pay-per-click or pay-per-lead advertising, the answer will be no. Please don't ask. * I do not review products or apps. * I am unable to accept sponsorship from apps or games that contain microtransactions or gambling. Source: https://www.tomscott.com/contact/ads https://www.tomscott.com/contact/ads
    - david_allison 5y ago
      > I wrote a more honest advert for VPN services and I found a company that was willing to sponsor the video. Unfortunately they kept asking for changes, and we disagreed on those, so at the last minute, I have had to blank their name out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY#t=5m52s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY#t=5m52s
      - schleck8 5y ago
        There is a good chance he made that up as a more interesting plot for the video.
  - lozenge 5y ago
    He's never had "ad deals".
vmception 5y ago
VPNs are just internet resellers. You should just use them for masking traffic on your local network (but not the VPN provider, or their data center, or their ISP), your ISP (but not the VPN provider, or their data center, or their ISP), appearing to come from a different location to the service you are trying to reach, circumventing rate limiting (don't be surprised if you find someone else has already used your VPN's IP for this). And that's it. None are better than the others for greater privacy such as in lawsuits, warrants, possibility of data being tapped at the data center location, assurance against logging, or protecting you from a criminal indictment. There is no way to prove that any VPN is good for privacy except for their own claims, even if you find a court case that was stonewalled in a way that matched the privacy claims that only is about that particular point in time, you have no way to know about the present or at any point in the future. Yes, this includes your favorite VPN, that you read about on your favorite blog, or was mentioned by your favorite most trusted youtuber. No, their claims about being in a bunker in Switzerland doesn't increase the viability of their claims. And yet, looking up VPNs on a search engine are only going to get you these affiliate marketing websites, harping on and on about all the privacy benefits of some particular one thats doing things oh-so-differently.
- cf141q5325 5y ago
  Fundamentally it allows * Locking out your ISP (data collection & introducing malicious traffic) * geolock/censorship circumvention * jurisdiction hopping Other then that, you exchange one point of trust (your ISP) for another (VPN/S provider) edit: This might sound stupid until you think about your ISP and your VPN/S providers having two different threat models and incentives.
Arnavion 5y ago
The biggest scam is that these companies call their products "VPNs" incorrectly to mislead you. A VPN actually has to have a PN that you join your client to in order to access other targets in that private network. Eg you're at home and you want to access your computer at work, so you connect to a VPN set up at your workplace. What these companies give you is just a proxy to the internet. These products were called "proxies" back in the day, but someone realized "VPN" sounds more awesome and has "Private" in it so they started calling their products that. The only connection these proxies have to VPNs is that they use the same tech under the hood (OpenVPN, Wireguard, etc).
- jmuguy 5y ago
  I don't think there's anything nefarious around the use of VPN by these services. That's just what they ended up being called because they're using VPN client software and VPN technology to enable the connection. Proxies are different. If someone was providing a Proxy service and calling it a VPN, that would be a scam (although a pretty silly one, imo). Also Proxy services do currently exist, and they have no issues calling themselves a proxy. Also I setup plenty of "real" VPN connections for businesses that tunneled 100% of internet traffic through the central office, because they wanted to be able to do DPI, etc.
- trillic 5y ago
  This isn't true for all VPN providers though. There are public VPN providers (Mullvad). Where each of your devices gets its own internal IP on their network and you can use it just as a typical VPN. It's just that most people don't use it that way.
- 0x0000000 5y ago
  I disagree with your take. These are VPNs because you are building private overlay tunnels on top of a public Internet underlay. Just because youre not using a VPN to tunnel into a private (e.g. RFC1918) network doesn't mean you haven't established a virtual private network over the Internet. Also, these are not proxies. A proxy terminates a layer 4/7 connnection from the user, and established its own layer 4/7 connection to the destination, fully man-in-the-middling the connection. When one is using these widely advertised VPN services, there is no layer 4 or 7 proxy^. Rather, the gateway at the VPN PoP is NAT'ing traffic at layer 3. ^IME, many of these services also provide an HTTP or SOCKS proxy, but that's not what a user is using when they have an app on their phone or thick client on the desktop.
ShroudedNight 5y ago
> ...and sometimes emphasize accessing otherwise unavailable content. I am most certainly not a lawyer, but I find it hard to imagine that the bolder VPN adverting wouldn't surely rise to the level of tortious interference given they seem to actively induce viewers to actively work around streaming geo-blocks contrary to user agreements
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
jrockway 5y ago
I feel like these have gotten better over time. The pitch used to be that your ISP was spying on you, now the pitch is that you can pretend to be in a different country. That's closer to the truth. (But of course, everyone has the list of VPN exit nodes and just blocks them. I wonder if any of these VPN services are actually peer to peer, so that your IP is an exit address for people that want to pretend to be in your country. The legal liability sounds staggering, but I guess that's why you set up your company in some country that doesn't care, accept crypto for payments, and hope for the best.)
- subpixel 5y ago
  I do use a VPN exclusively to watch geo-locked television. They have specific connections for particular services, Which they (I assume) monitor and maintain so they don’t get blocked for long. That’s worth the fee to me.
  - Akronymus 5y ago
    Genuine question: Why not pirate it at that point? It seems to be more convenient and even cheaper, to me.
    - probably_wrong 5y ago
      Cheaper? Yes. More convenient? No. I have a Raspberry Pi with OSMC where I installed the plugins for several online services. My friends hate my setup. Sure, you can watch anything you want if you know what you want to watch, but it sucks for browsing the catalogues to see what's available. I also get interrupted once a month when a new Widevine version is released, which takes ~10min to download and install. And then there's the language issue: if the movie/series is not in a language I speak I need to spend 10-20 minutes hunting for subtitles. That means: download a subtitle, check that the starting time matches (or tweak it manually), skip ahead to ensure that they remain in sync (good luck not getting spoiled while, simultaneously, checking that the subtitles make sense with what's happening on screen), moving everything to the right directory... All of this is second nature to me so I'm not bothered, but I can totally understand paying a fee for a single-click interface.
askura 5y ago
The author sent me this awhile ago. It's messed up how much fake information there is.

123 points by zdw 5y ago

How to make me doubt your credibility in one easy step? Hawk VPN products in your YouTube video. I will automatically know you are an idiot.

tambeb 5y ago
I've seen Sabine Hossenfelder do a few NordVPN ads in her videos and I don't think she's an idiot. To be clear though, this isn't a judgement about VPNs or me saying I trust her and so I'll buy that VPN. It's more that as long as the product isn't something too crazy, most content producers will probably happily take the ad money because they need to eat. While on the topic of NordVPN... a few months ago I was looking to get a little bit of podcast marketing going for my project and spoke to the person responsible for ads on a comedian podcast I like. It's one that is pretty small and would've been affordable for a small operation like mine, but it turned out that NordVPN was already in negotiations to buy out the next year of ads and that was that.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

edgyquant 5y ago

My biggest issue is they always go with the claim you can watch Netflix etc from other countries but I can’t even watch Netflix for my own country with Express or Nord VPN as it detects them and won’t allow it. These are the two most advertised VPNs and it’s blatantly false advertisement.

CraneWorm 5y ago
It's a mixed bag, the so-called "obfuscated servers" can sometimes allow you to watch region-locked content on Netflix. But they (Netflix) are definitely trying to combat these attempts and you can get cut off in the middle of the movie... Pirates offer a superior service every time, until this is solved nothing will change.
- truemotive 5y ago
  region locks are such an absurd leftover from the entertainment industry, and likely at least in part because they’re not going to improve the systems they put in place to hypercharge folks based on country/local market effects, etc. Really all I have to say it’s just stupid to have them in the streaming age unless you’re pulling in the checks.

rainbowzootsuit 5y ago

I use sponsorblock now and my exposure to VPN ads has fallen to approximately zero, as it is meant to be.

walrus01 5y ago

Missed opportunity for a humorous notification at the top of the PDF: "THIS RESEARCH REPORT BROUGHT TO YOU BY RAID SHADOW LEGENDS"

smoldesu 5y ago
"Audio version of this research paper available for the hearing-impaired, brought to you by Raycon and Auidble. Get 30% off your next pair of earbuds, and your next 3 audiobooks on us with code SELLOUT"

Ansil849 5y ago

So in layman's terms: "we looked at a bunch of ads, and found that a bunch of them are making bullshit claims". I mean yeah....that is what advertising is: exaggerated, nebulous, or otherwise evasive if not outright false claims.

heresie-dabord 5y ago
I'll say in the defence of advertising that it doesn't need to be a pack of lies. There are countries where it is illegal to publish false information. That said, Y*tube is not to be trusted as a source of information. When people mistake entertainment for democracy, they are living in Plato's cave.
dboreham 5y ago
This may be accepted in US culture, but it's not the norm everywhere. Many countries have a culture that advertising should be truthful and not deceptive, backed up by laws and enforcement. e.g. https://www.asa.org.uk/ https://www.asa.org.uk/
- Ansil849 5y ago
  > Many countries have a culture that advertising should be truthful and not deceptive Truthful advertising is an oxymoron, like saying 'peaceful wars'. The only difference in sectors where there is ostensibly more regulation is that the lies are not something concrete like hard figures, but more abstract, like creating the illusion that a product will bring happiness.
  - dboreham 5y ago
    It's a spectrum, right. You could make an ad that says "Acetaminophen cures headache symptoms for most people and has minimal side-effects. Don't take a ton of it because then you'll die". That would still increase sales of the drug and I think it's entirely truthful.
jbothma 5y ago
They don't. I hear the same overstatement of what vpns will provide in terms of security from non-technical and sometimes technical people. Somewhere these misrepresentations are being taken as fact.

Brajeshwar 5y ago

What VPN Providers do you suggest? I would not like to "just" fire up a digitalocean, AWS or a Raspberry pi. Something reliable enough for a daily driver, no-logging, and a speedier experience from a user in a corner in India. I have used ExpressVPN but then they exited. I had the opportunity to used ClearVPN for a while, OK but too many bells and whistles. I think I also got IVACY in some discount sale for 5-years. This one just kinda works and I might actually stick to this if nothing bad happens. I had had tried Mullvad for a few months but was slow from India (2020-ish). I'm not worried and am not hiding anything from any country's 3-letter institutes. However, I like have one handy that I can go in as my bubble to feel comfortable in.

causi 5y ago
Depends on your use case. If it's piracy I would stick to services that have been subpoenaed and produced no records.
clsec 5y ago
IMO Restore Privacy [1] is a reliable source for VPN recommendations. For what it's worth, I use Surfshark and am very happy with them (except the lack of a kill switch in the CLI app and the lack of a Linux GUI client). [1] https://restoreprivacy.com/ https://restoreprivacy.com/ edit: typo
k8sToGo 5y ago
Mullvad is the go to one at the moment. Maybe try it again?
alexb_ 5y ago
Seconding Mullvad, but I'm in the US and not India so it might be different.
dgellow 5y ago
I already trust ProtonMail with my emails, so started using ProtonVPN when I have a need for one. They have wireguard support now.
scim-knox-twox 5y ago

jrmann100 5y ago

Tom Scott did a great analysis and interpretation of what an honest VPN ad might look like: https://youtu.be/WVDQEoe6ZWY https://youtu.be/WVDQEoe6ZWY

willis936 5y ago
And lost his VPN ad deals. There was no better way to confirm his narrative than to pull out.
- devortel 5y ago
  I don't think Tom Scott ever promoted a VPN product in a YouTube video. He's actually quite selective with his brand deals. From his contact page regarding ads: * If you're asking about pay-per-click or pay-per-lead advertising, the answer will be no. Please don't ask. * I do not review products or apps. * I am unable to accept sponsorship from apps or games that contain microtransactions or gambling. Source: https://www.tomscott.com/contact/ads https://www.tomscott.com/contact/ads
  - david_allison 5y ago
    > I wrote a more honest advert for VPN services and I found a company that was willing to sponsor the video. Unfortunately they kept asking for changes, and we disagreed on those, so at the last minute, I have had to blank their name out. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY#t=5m52s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY#t=5m52s
    - schleck8 5y ago
      There is a good chance he made that up as a more interesting plot for the video.
- lozenge 5y ago
  He's never had "ad deals".

vmception 5y ago

VPNs are just internet resellers. You should just use them for masking traffic on your local network (but not the VPN provider, or their data center, or their ISP), your ISP (but not the VPN provider, or their data center, or their ISP), appearing to come from a different location to the service you are trying to reach, circumventing rate limiting (don't be surprised if you find someone else has already used your VPN's IP for this). And that's it. None are better than the others for greater privacy such as in lawsuits, warrants, possibility of data being tapped at the data center location, assurance against logging, or protecting you from a criminal indictment. There is no way to prove that any VPN is good for privacy except for their own claims, even if you find a court case that was stonewalled in a way that matched the privacy claims that only is about that particular point in time, you have no way to know about the present or at any point in the future. Yes, this includes your favorite VPN, that you read about on your favorite blog, or was mentioned by your favorite most trusted youtuber. No, their claims about being in a bunker in Switzerland doesn't increase the viability of their claims. And yet, looking up VPNs on a search engine are only going to get you these affiliate marketing websites, harping on and on about all the privacy benefits of some particular one thats doing things oh-so-differently.

cf141q5325 5y ago
Fundamentally it allows * Locking out your ISP (data collection & introducing malicious traffic) * geolock/censorship circumvention * jurisdiction hopping Other then that, you exchange one point of trust (your ISP) for another (VPN/S provider) edit: This might sound stupid until you think about your ISP and your VPN/S providers having two different threat models and incentives.

Arnavion 5y ago

The biggest scam is that these companies call their products "VPNs" incorrectly to mislead you. A VPN actually has to have a PN that you join your client to in order to access other targets in that private network. Eg you're at home and you want to access your computer at work, so you connect to a VPN set up at your workplace. What these companies give you is just a proxy to the internet. These products were called "proxies" back in the day, but someone realized "VPN" sounds more awesome and has "Private" in it so they started calling their products that. The only connection these proxies have to VPNs is that they use the same tech under the hood (OpenVPN, Wireguard, etc).

jmuguy 5y ago
I don't think there's anything nefarious around the use of VPN by these services. That's just what they ended up being called because they're using VPN client software and VPN technology to enable the connection. Proxies are different. If someone was providing a Proxy service and calling it a VPN, that would be a scam (although a pretty silly one, imo). Also Proxy services do currently exist, and they have no issues calling themselves a proxy. Also I setup plenty of "real" VPN connections for businesses that tunneled 100% of internet traffic through the central office, because they wanted to be able to do DPI, etc.
trillic 5y ago
This isn't true for all VPN providers though. There are public VPN providers (Mullvad). Where each of your devices gets its own internal IP on their network and you can use it just as a typical VPN. It's just that most people don't use it that way.
0x0000000 5y ago
I disagree with your take. These are VPNs because you are building private overlay tunnels on top of a public Internet underlay. Just because youre not using a VPN to tunnel into a private (e.g. RFC1918) network doesn't mean you haven't established a virtual private network over the Internet. Also, these are not proxies. A proxy terminates a layer 4/7 connnection from the user, and established its own layer 4/7 connection to the destination, fully man-in-the-middling the connection. When one is using these widely advertised VPN services, there is no layer 4 or 7 proxy^. Rather, the gateway at the VPN PoP is NAT'ing traffic at layer 3. ^IME, many of these services also provide an HTTP or SOCKS proxy, but that's not what a user is using when they have an app on their phone or thick client on the desktop.

ShroudedNight 5y ago

> ...and sometimes emphasize accessing otherwise unavailable content. I am most certainly not a lawyer, but I find it hard to imagine that the bolder VPN adverting wouldn't surely rise to the level of tortious interference given they seem to actively induce viewers to actively work around streaming geo-blocks contrary to user agreements

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

jrockway 5y ago

I feel like these have gotten better over time. The pitch used to be that your ISP was spying on you, now the pitch is that you can pretend to be in a different country. That's closer to the truth. (But of course, everyone has the list of VPN exit nodes and just blocks them. I wonder if any of these VPN services are actually peer to peer, so that your IP is an exit address for people that want to pretend to be in your country. The legal liability sounds staggering, but I guess that's why you set up your company in some country that doesn't care, accept crypto for payments, and hope for the best.)

subpixel 5y ago
I do use a VPN exclusively to watch geo-locked television. They have specific connections for particular services, Which they (I assume) monitor and maintain so they don’t get blocked for long. That’s worth the fee to me.
- Akronymus 5y ago
  Genuine question: Why not pirate it at that point? It seems to be more convenient and even cheaper, to me.
  - probably_wrong 5y ago
    Cheaper? Yes. More convenient? No. I have a Raspberry Pi with OSMC where I installed the plugins for several online services. My friends hate my setup. Sure, you can watch anything you want if you know what you want to watch, but it sucks for browsing the catalogues to see what's available. I also get interrupted once a month when a new Widevine version is released, which takes ~10min to download and install. And then there's the language issue: if the movie/series is not in a language I speak I need to spend 10-20 minutes hunting for subtitles. That means: download a subtitle, check that the starting time matches (or tweak it manually), skip ahead to ensure that they remain in sync (good luck not getting spoiled while, simultaneously, checking that the subtitles make sense with what's happening on screen), moving everything to the right directory... All of this is second nature to me so I'm not bothered, but I can totally understand paying a fee for a single-click interface.

askura 5y ago

The author sent me this awhile ago. It's messed up how much fake information there is.