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  • Data like this makes me wonder what Firefox is doing. If Nord can sell a VPN surely Mozilla could get some market share

    • I'm not convinced the VPNs actually make financial sense, I kinda wonder if there is someone funding them. They market so aggressively, and are priced so cheaply it doesnt quite make sense to me.

      • I used to work for PIA. The best users are the occasional user, and there's a lot of them. They cost little bandwidth, they pop on every now and then and off fairly quickly. Andrew also got pretty lucky, riding both the Bitcoin and Snowden waves. It probably did ultimately run at a loss at some point, but all the big ones could ride on their crypto payments rapidly increasing in value, and the hardcore privacy people were very happy to pay in crypto.

        You can easily cram ~1000-5000 active users on a 10 Gbps server because you can assume that most people are far from reaching gigabit on their own (OpenVPN limitations helped a lot there). Even at just a dollar a year per users you've still got 5 grands which more than pays for the server which really only needs a good NIC and a bunch of IPs. But remember, most of those are idle or not connected at all, so you can have many more users than there is bandwidth available. And at that scale you get bulk discounts on the servers as you fill up a good rack or two.

        I have to imagine at this point the market is incredibly saturated though, I left a bit over 6 years ago.

  • This is the best summary I could come up with:

    More than half of Americans are using ad blocking software, and among advertising, programming, and security professionals that fraction is more like two-thirds to three-quarters.

    More striking are the figures cited for technically savvy users who have worked at least five years in their respective fields – veteran advertisers, programmers, and cybersecurity experts.

    "People who know how the internet works – because they work as developers or in security or in advertising – they've all over the years decided that it was a good idea to use a tracker blocker or content blocker or adblocker, whatever you call it," said Jean-Paul Schmetz, CEO of Ghostery, in an interview with The Register.

    "It's pretty unanimous that people who work in this industry and know how these things function want to protect themselves."

    Schmetz said one surprising finding had to do with the extent to which people trust various companies that collect online data.

    But truly the best way to support The Register is to sign up for a free account, comment on stories, share our links, and spread the word of our honest independent IT journalism.

    The original article contains 681 words, the summary contains 185 words. Saved 73%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

  • Once I had to use the internet without and ad blocker ( shiver ). It was horrible. I still have nightmares.

    Joking aside. I couldn’t believe how crammed full and chaotic sites were without an ad blocker. I have no evidence to support this other than my experience but I think , for me , ad blockers are good for my mental health. Being constantly exposed to all those messages trying to exploit insecurities can’t be good for people.

    Anyways ad blockers are the best.

  • Does anyone actually believe this garbage?

    I don't think that that is true in any so-called developed world nation. Think of your friends; how many know what an ad-blocker is? Who don't use the browser that came installed on the pc/phone?

58 comments