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This Video Is Sponsored By ███ VPN

Tom Scott · Youtube · 34 HN points · 11 HN comments
HN Theater has aggregated all Hacker News stories and comments that mention Tom Scott's video "This Video Is Sponsored By ███ VPN".
Youtube Summary
I tried to write a more honest VPN commercial. The sponsor wasn't happy about it. • Get ██ days of ███ VPN free at ██████.com/honest

The ASA ruling I referenced: https://www.asa.org.uk/rulings/tefincom-sa-a19-547668.html

I'm at https://tomscott.com
on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tomscott
on Facebook at https://facebook.com/tomscott
and on Instagram as tomscottgo
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All the comments and stories posted to Hacker News that reference this video.
... and a lot of those VPN companies are probably VC-funded.

Tom Scott made a good video on the uses and non-uses of VPNs [1]. VPN advertising has changed since that video to downplay "security", but what I think is odd is that they've replaced that with advertisement that basically is "violate the terms of service of Netflix".

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY

franga2000
Glad I'm not the only one that got the feeling this video impacted the entire VPN advertising space. All of us techies have been screaming this from day one and many tech-focused creators even talked about this publicly, but the ads kept going. Tom Scott seems to be in the perfect position where he has the technical background to understand why the ads were wrong, but also has a much wider and more general audience that includes many other creators.

I'm guessing many creators learned about just how blatant the lies they were selling were for the first time from him and put pressure on their sponsors to chill with the fear-mongering. And even those that knew and lied regardless were probably scared that their audience now knew too, so shifting away from these talking points was in their best interest too.

TL;DR: Tom Scott is awesome and he did a lot of good by making that video

shalmanese
I hope someone does a similar takedown of Masterworks (fractional art investing). I've seen way too many financial planning or finance adjacent podcasts regurgitate Masterworks claims completely uncritically to a way too impressionable audience.
sneak
If He didn’t want them shorn, He wouldn’t have made them sheep.
tjs8rj
Could you list the erroneous claims made in Masterworks ads? I’m not affiliated with them in any way other than as an interested potential customer (and I’ve seen the charts on their site, but haven’t made any deposits)
PoignardAzur
I kind of wonder how much NordVPN paid him to make that "actually VPNs are great sometimes" ad with the robot head.

They had to be gunning for it for a while.

iudqnolq
Tom Scott's current VPN ads are an interesting balancing act.

He generally opens with him using the VPN to get around geo-targetting in a way that isn't in violation of TOS. He does a huge amount of travel, so he does run into poorly designed websites that try to be helpful and serve content by location sometimes.

He doesn't say outright that such opportunities are rare, and normal people may never encounter them. He does say that before using VPNs to get around restrictions by streaming services users should make sure they're not in violation of any TOS. He never talks about security.

musicale
> violate the terms of service of Netflix

It's a technical solution to a business-created problem.

And Netflix and VPNs probably create incremental business for each other.

Jul 17, 2022 · rchowe on $9.99/month
After Tom Scott made a video about VPNs[1], apparently a lot of VPN company executives got together to rethink how they market their product. He mentions that the reason there are so many VPN ads is probably because they are VC-funded, so perhaps the gravy train will run out for these companies some day.

It's odd to me that they have pivoted to marketing VPNs for out-of-region TV, because that's against the terms of service of pretty much every streaming provider. I guess if the ads don't mention a name, they can say "oh we expected you to find a streaming service where that's not illegal, not use Netflix."

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY

Jun 27, 2022 · 11 points, 10 comments · submitted by jeanlucas
Sohcahtoa82
Starting to see a lot of criticism towards VPNs and the advertisements for them. Tom is right on the money. The ads are incredibly misleading.

The only thing I would add is that a VPN won't do a damn thing about websites tracking you. For that, you need a ad/tracker blocker like uBlock Origin.

fy20
Fun fact: Both NordVPN and SurfShark are run by the same company. It's now out in the open and they have merged (earlier this year), but even from the start there were very close ties. The parent company of NordVPN provided consulting services when SurfShark was formed:

https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/surfshark-an...

I've heard rumours that it's even closer than that, and that they were both run by the same people from the start, with the original intent to have two separate brands to allow them to capture more of the market. Is there a name for this technique?

the_biot
I'm seeing the same thing where I live, where a new fiber infrastructure has a choice of a few ISPs, but two of them are actually shells owned by the same outfit (an existing hosting provider). I'm really not sure why. The products aren't substantially different, as I guess they aren't with these two VPN providers.
Sohcahtoa82
To give consumers the illusion of choice. If an aggravated customer cancels their service with Shell Company A to switch to Shell Company B, the corporation that owns them both still has that customer.
jeanlucas
Note: Tom Scott released a video today sponsored by Nord VPN, looks like this time they paid well.
nasretdinov
Technically it wasn't Tom speaking, so all is good

UPD: never mind, just watched the most recent video, it looks like the real Tom Scott was speaking this time

the_biot
Always sad to see when people so blatantly sell out. The linked video is right on the money, too.

I wonder what made him change his mind. Is this his primary income now, maybe? Or did he just get greedier?

CactusOnFire
I watched this video earlier today, and had previously seen his video criticizing VPN services.

The video he was commenting on was about how "tradition" has no place in business, and then segued into why he believed a service like Nord VPN can be valuable.

The tounge-in-cheek segue was a reference to his previous video. I still believe that everything in that video rings true, but despite effectively "burning the bridge" with NordVPN, he ultimately found an effective use for the service, which was getting around region-bans and language-locks when using the internet abroad.

His willingness to endorse them wasn't inconsistent with his previous video- and he has said nothing contradictory. Rather than emphasizing this as a means of security, though, he emphasized it as a way to spoofing IP addresses for services that require you to be in a specific region- which for some people, might be worth the price-tag.

craftkiller
Well in the video he released today, he didn't make any of the silly claims he was arguing against in this video. He doesn't talk about "military grade encryption" or anything to do with privacy/security. He just lists a couple practical uses for having an IP address in a different country.
jeanlucas
I noticed that, but it yet doesn't feel right.

It was not just about what they advertise, he warns about how they can't be safe by design. And yet... NordVPN did use those same tactics in the past.

To me, and that is very personal, is like doing a gun advertisement and not mention the bad parts, but find old posts from you asking for gun control.

Doesn't seem coherent.

I did a small tweetstorm about it[0], and will forget about this later on. Ah, I also unsubscribed from his channel.

[0]: https://twitter.com/aleattorium/status/1541445092820631552

Tom Scott did a great analysis and interpretation of what an honest VPN ad might look like: https://youtu.be/WVDQEoe6ZWY
willis936
And lost his VPN ad deals. There was no better way to confirm his narrative than to pull out.
lozenge
He's never had "ad deals".
toby-
Sure he has. He's promoted VPNs before: look at the very start of the video linked above.
devortel
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

david_allison
> 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

schleck8
There is a good chance he made that up as a more interesting plot for the video.
I think that this tom scott video summarizes the same sentiment nicely, especially around the VPN ads on youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY
Shank
Perhaps the most interesting point, which I hadn't considered in all of this, is the amount of advertising and discounts offered by VPN companies. Bandwidth is relatively expensive for a fixed price service. If a VPN is expecting you to slurp down gigabytes of data overseas each day, surely that transit has a cost, right?

Why is it that some services offer astounding 93% off discounts [0]? Why is that they almost always have capital to sponsor seemingly all sorts of random assorted content?

Tom Scott has a bit of a point: it's really odd that there are just so many of these companies, and they offer very suspiciously good prices. Is that the byproduct of everyone buying and not using VPNs? Or something else?

[0]: hxxps://www [dot] bleepingcomputer [dot] /offer/deals/new-deal-93-percent-off-a-windscribe-vpn-pro-lifetime-subscription/

resfirestar
The offers for ridiculously long term (2+ years or lifetime) discounted service seem like bets that most users are not going to be long term VPN users. If the objective is to make a user pay $60 for a product they’ll use for a week or two and forget about, just extend the term out as far as you want to make it seem like a better deal.
wmf
The simplest explanation is that bandwidth is in fact not expensive and most people are light users.
netr0ute
The best way to manage this is to have a Tier 1 peering agreement, so you pay nada for bandwidth.
pseudo0
Commercial bandwidth is pretty cheap. You can get servers for a few hundred bucks a month that have one gbps unmetered bandwidth. Then just oversubscribe as much as possible, and the end result is a few bucks a month per user. The discounts are arguably a bit of deceptive marketing, as I've seen some of those services run the same 90% discount campaigns for years. At that point it's the base price, not a discount. The number of options is easily explained by the low barriers to entry, as virtually all of these services just stick a GUI on top of OpenVPN.
franga2000
You have a point about oversubscribing, but you can't really run a VPN service on just any cheap server hosting you can find. That will basically ensure you're on every blocklist under the sun and that defeats the main use most people have for VPNs.
411111111111111
Your can get bare metal servers with unmetered bandwidth from Hetzner for way less then $100 per month. These ips aren't in the ranges that are usually blocked by cloudflare etc.
SahAssar
Those get you two countries, finland and germany. Most VPN countries advertise dozens or up to a hundred countries. Add in OVH who also have unmetered and you also get canada, france, UK and poland. A good start, but I don't think that is what these VPN providers are doing.

Those ranges are also often blocked by sites like netflix, which wouldn't play well with the VPN customers.

I feel like if someone is hawking wares on their channel they should at least use it/have faith in it/do their research. Tom Scott has a great video about VPN sponsorship and how he turned down a sponsorship from a VPN company because of the copy they wanted him to say and debunks the ads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY

Mad respect for him, and if he ever suggest a paid product in the future i'd trust him. Conversely i really dislike when they clearly don't use the product, or are shilling a product that i KNOW is bad - looking at you raycons. I can't help but lose respect and definitely distrust every sponsorship they have.

tl;dr integrity matters, raycons are really not that great, and i'm tired of hearing the same copy over and over: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb58b7ob2yQ

sneak
VPN ads that are truthful and delivered with integrity are still disrespectful and disgusting, because advertising is a cancer.
KMnO4
Advertising isn’t black/white. I want to see ads telling me there’s a local farm selling produce a few minutes from my house. Or that the new Marvel movie is coming out in a couple months.

These things bring value to my life. How else would I know about them?

hippira
Yeah, even Cancer isn’t black / white. That concentrated mass showing up on your CT scan might have a chance to be co-living peacefully for the rest of your life. And removing them is actually causing your body more harms.
bscphil
I think that's pushing the boundary on what can be considered advertising these days. It's a question of choice. Advertisements are foisted upon (mostly) unwilling viewers to convince them to buy things they don't want or need, or at least to cause them to make a choice based on brand identity rather than a rational evaluation of the value provided. This is bad.

What you're talking abut is something else entirely. If I'm watching something on Hulu, and the show stops to show me an ad for a Marvel movie coming out in a couple months, that's intrusive. If I deliberately go to YouTube to watch the trailer, that's a free choice. They're such completely different experiences from the user's point of view that it's a misnomer to refer to both as "advertising".

Likewise, my parents have solicited mailers from local groceries because they want to know what vegetables are in this week. There are all sorts of websites and other mechanisms for letting people know about events and opportunities going on in their area. Me sitting down to watch some sports or something and getting bombarded by ads (by Arby's, not a "local farm") is not the same situation.

If you want a bright line, imagine a world with no profit motive. Would we still have movie trailers and fliers to let you know about local farm produce? I think so. Would there still be television advertisements and lies about VPN services on YouTube videos? Obviously not.

Arnavion
Tom missed the biggest factor in VPN companies' exaggerations - that they call themselves "VPNs" because of the positive connotations of "Private", even though they're just proxies and have nothing to do with VPNs.
userbinator
...and even the ones that use actual VPN software don't actually have anything for the "N" part of "VPN", so they are still just proxies.

But I guess it makes it easier to refer to than "proxy for all protocols."

hunter2_
I've only used my work VPN, so I just assumed commercial VPNs had similar mechanics. They don't lease IP addresses?
Arnavion
There's a tunnel from your computer to the VPN entrypoint, but the point of a VPN is to become part of another Network of computers that is Private and could thus not be reached otherwise. There's no private network of computers for these "VPN" services. They're just a proxy to the internet.
Unfortunately as GP has mentioned, advertising around these typical VPN companies (Nord, Proton, ExpressVPN, Surfshark and many more) tends to be very misleading. Tom Scott put out a good video[1] that tries to debunk various marketing claims.

Sure there are use cases like getting around georestrictions, and like you mentioned you can use it to get around tracking. Except that for privacy and evading tracking you need more than just a VPN, you need to be doing things like adblocking, tracker blocking, clearing all of your cookies, not signing in to anything because then the service gets to link your new VPN IP with you again. VPN ads that sell "privacy" is snake oil unless it is paired with a guide on the additional things you should be doing.

[1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY

Half off-topic but I find NordVPN's marketing extremely distasteful and in the same vein as snake oil (same as many VPN providers).

This video[1] that describes some of the issues with VPN marketing in general is so widespread that it has created old-school SEO sites[2] to game it where they hide the actual search term with white font on white background.

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY

2: https://www.theprolist.org/tom-scott-vpn/

vpnintel
VPN marketers can be quite aggressive. This was part of our motivation to create this site. We wanted there to be a source of verifiable data that we could use to make unbiased recommendations or that readers could use to draw their own conclusions.
> If you wanted to see what the most paranoid, security-conscious people are connecting to, and you wanted to install software on their systems that is designed to read all their network traffic and then redirect it through a single choke point, then setting up a VPN service with a huge advertising budget would be a great way to do it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY

mindslight
Security conscious people aren't installing proprietary VPN trapware, nor routing all of their traffic out one VPN.
jolux
What are “security conscious” people doing instead, out of curiosity?
mindslight
Running generic OpenVPN/Wireguard/TOR/etc, and segmenting traffic by purpose/nym.
jolux
Sure, that's what I recommend. Wireguard specifically.
zeepzeep
TOR
yjftsjthsd-h
I suppose the traditional paranoid answer is TOR.
sverhagen
I assumed this was meant to target a particular cross-section of people that were security conscious, yet not tech savvy.
Tom Scott recently made an video [0] you might be interested in. It's well worth the seven and a half minutes to watch it, IMO.

> I tried to write a more honest VPN commercial. The sponsor wasn't happy about it.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY

remarkEon
Thanks for this
> * Seriously creepy stuff. I hate how VPNs are being shilled by e-celebs these days as a privacy improvement.*

You may enjoy Tom Scott's video:

> I tried to write a more honest VPN commercial. The sponsor wasn't happy about it. • Get ■■■ days of ■■■ VPN free at ■■■■.com/honest

* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WVDQEoe6ZWY

mikl
I already did ;)
Nov 05, 2019 · 1 points, 0 comments · submitted by tambourine_man
Oct 31, 2019 · 5 points, 0 comments · submitted by rahuldottech
Oct 29, 2019 · 1 points, 0 comments · submitted by 2Pacalypse-
Oct 28, 2019 · 16 points, 3 comments · submitted by filleokus
aussiegreenie
Considering about 1/2 the VPN companies are owned by the Chinese, they are fronts for the Chinese government.
rasz
Dont forget products including VPN functionality (Opera), or run of the mill PC HDD maintenance tools calling home every time you run them (easeus, AOMEI Partition Assistant).
colejohnson66
Not that you’re wrong, but I’ve never heard this before. Source?
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