[HN Gopher] Why is every podcast sponsored by a VPN company?
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Why is every podcast sponsored by a VPN company?
Author : yarapavan
Score : 43 points
Date : 2022-09-14 17:27 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (girdley.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (girdley.substack.com)
| bena wrote:
| A few months ago, this article would have been titled, "Why is
| every podcast sponsored by a shaving company?" or "a mattress
| company" or "some other company".
| pessimizer wrote:
| Meal kits. But in none of those cases would it be weird to ask
| why (so many people on podcasts want to send me overpriced food
| I have to cook myself.)
| RutgerHauer wrote:
| My stepmom sponsors my podcast. Brazzers made an episode about
| our arrangement.
| fancyfredbot wrote:
| If all these VPNs make such huge margins, and if barriers to
| entry are so low, then why hasn't someone undercut them?
| midislack wrote:
| Intelligence agencies will shut you down if you compete with
| them.
| paulryanrogers wrote:
| Wouldn't this tip their hand, exposing them as such agencies?
| A simpler explanation is there's a lot of money sloshing
| around trying to corner new or lucrative markets.
| missedthecue wrote:
| VPNs are very high margin products (50% of revenue is cashflow,
| the author points out). But they suffer from higher churn rates
| than most SaaS businesses. Switching costs are essentially free,
| it's hard to differentiate your product from someone else's in a
| meaningful way, discounts and promos abound, and achieving any
| kind of lock-in is next to impossible.
|
| Therefore, they advertise a lot. We here on HN probably get a lot
| of sampling bias because we are more likely to listen to tech
| related podcasts. If we listened to fashion podcasts, we'd hear
| different ads.
|
| VPNs also have a unique problem where the people that really
| _need_ their product don 't have the facilities to subscribe to
| one. To illustrate this, most of the countries in Africa censor
| the web to varying degrees, but the credit card penetration rate
| on the continent is only at 4% right now. So VPNs have to
| advertise to the people who don't _need_ VPNs, but can afford
| them. And that 's why you hear them talking about how everyone at
| Starbucks is snooping on your web traffic as if https isn't 30
| year old technology or hyping up their "military grade"
| encryption (i.e. AES-256 run of the mill stuff).
|
| Source: I work for a VPN company.
| zwkrt wrote:
| I particularly like the spin that the Youtube channel We're in
| Hell uses to advertise their VPN. Example:
| https://youtu.be/H_JQAx5uXB0?t=308
|
| "You're still not sure if you are as cheap or as evil as you
| could be. That's where SurfShark comes in!"
| lloydatkinson wrote:
| Many youtube videos not even aimed at tech audience are
| sponsored by node vpn
| naet wrote:
| There are a couple companies or industries that seem to dominate
| large sections of the digital ad market for videos, podcasts,
| live streams, social media, or other content creator focused
| markets.* They aren't all VPNs, but VPN is one of the main
| categories for sure.
|
| Not sure why these companies have a larger advertisement budget
| or why they are choosing those platforms over other more
| traditional ad opportunities.
|
| Some examples: Audio books / podcasts (Audible), shaving supplies
| (dollar shave club), sports betting (Draft Kings), crypto and
| crypto betting (Stake), VPNs (Nord), online classes / tutorials
| (Skillshare), etc.
|
| *At least based on my own anecdotal online media consumption.
| iudqnolq wrote:
| Some of those obviously have negligible marginal costs. I think
| the ones that are less obvious, like shaving and mattresses,
| exhibit the same characteristics.
|
| I haven't heard this from a reliable source, but I read
| somewhere on the internet the founder of Dollar Shave Club
| bought a warehouse of low quality razors from a company that
| went bankrupt and misrepresented them as custom premium
| products. I don't know anything about that situation anyone
| wouldn't see by googling basic terms though.
| tinus_hn wrote:
| Or perhaps that's just what Big Shave wants you to think!
| tablespoon wrote:
| > Some examples: Audio books / podcasts (Audible), shaving
| supplies (dollar shave club), sports betting (Draft Kings),
| crypto and crypto betting (Stake), VPNs (Nord), online classes
| / tutorials (Skillshare), etc.
|
| It's been awhile since I've listened to podcasts like that, but
| two other heavy advertiser I can recall are: online mattress
| companies and SquareSpace.
|
| I've also noticed that newspaper-affilliated news podcasts
| often are full of advertisements for CEO podcasts (which
| appears mainly meant to pump up the CEO's prestige/name
| recognition).
| kwhitefoot wrote:
| They aren't. It just seems that way because the ones that you
| listen to are.
| jbigelow76 wrote:
| I read the article twice just to make sure I didn't miss it but I
| believe the article isn't the headline "Why is every podcast
| sponsored by a VPN company?" which then goes on to explain why
| podcasts are (might be?) a good advertising channel. The article
| is literally the headline, a summary of the VPN biz and... that's
| it. Nothing specific about podcast sponsoring or how that channel
| differs from any others. lol
| rchowe wrote:
| ... 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 wrote:
| 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
| iudqnolq wrote:
| 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.
| shalmanese wrote:
| 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 wrote:
| If He didn't want them shorn, He wouldn't have made them
| sheep.
| musicale wrote:
| > 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.
| toddmorey wrote:
| My experience has been that every podcast is sponsored by a
| another podcast. I'm not sure where the chain ends.
| jmt_ wrote:
| Is that more the case for particular categories of podcasts?
| Because I haven't noticed this myself. I mainly listen to
| stand-up comedian/general comedy podcasts and the usual
| advertising suspects are Raid Shadow Legends, NordVPN, etc.
| Other than recurring guests/hosts, the podcasts I watch seem
| mostly disjoint from one another.
| rentfree-media wrote:
| I do a podcast.
|
| A lot of that is a tried and true method of promotion for those
| coming into podcasting without a big following elsewhere to try
| to convert.
|
| We started with a fairly large social media following that we
| could promote with, but others without such an existing
| audience are better off advertising on similar shows. After
| all, that's the draw of podcasting as a medium... advertising
| efficacy is pretty high.
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