this post was submitted on 22 Mar 2024
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Privacy
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It really turns my head upside down how is this possible, how does a VPN company has enough market / potential customers / money for this.
Because they charge 5€/month for it?
Their CAC (Customer Acquisition Cost) is usually very high, just think about it. Aside from the subway ads that have ridiculous costs, they usually offer youtubers the equivalent of a year's subscription for each conversion. They also have to factor in operational costs so they've to keep new customers around for 1,5-2 years to reach break-even, only after that they've profit. Their business is based on a CLV (Customer lifetime value) that greatly exceeds the average for a B2C digital service - in order to survive they're either doing shady stuff with your data OR living of VC hype money.
Mullvad only do limited advertising and afaik don't sponsor youtubers
You call a subway ad "limited"? Are you aware of the prices on those?
Compared to how every single video ever is sponsored by nordvpn
And a whole network subway ad will cost you at least 50k upfront :P
$50k isn't that much for a company. Mullvad is pretty popular, so I'm guessing they could afford it.
I've even seen Duckduckgo billboards and whatnot. If they can afford it, so can Mullvad.
Yes.
That's really not a lot. LA has 13M people in its Metro area, and 900k weekday riders on the Metro system (not sure about the subway itself, but rail is allot 1/4 to 1/3 of that). VPNs have been getting more popular with ads and sponsorships across social media.
So I absolutely don't think it's unreasonable that they'll pick up ~1k new subscribers per month while this ad campaign runs. I don't know how many users they have (it's antithetical for them to release that), but surely they can afford to run a small campaign like this, just given how many servers they have and some back of the napkin estimates to guess how many users would be needed to justify that number of servers.
I don't mean limited by price, I mean limited as in they don't just shove ads everywhere like nordvpn or whatever.