Tobold's Blog
Friday, September 19, 2025
 
VPN irony and YouTube views dropping

Once upon a time, Netflix mostly had licenced content. And because I still was doing a lot of business travel back then, I couldn't help but notice that if I used Netflix while in the USA, I got a lot more, and different, shows than when I was back home. Licence deals are complicated and often have regional restrictions, and Netflix was showing content based on the IP address of your current location, not your billing address. So for some time I used a VPN to pretend I lived in the USA, so I could watch Netflix USA shows. But over the years a lot of that licenced content was pulled from Netflix, as the companies making these shows opened up their own streaming services. Netflix began to produce and show more of their "original", Netflix-produced shows. And as these shows didn't have complicated licence deals attached to them, the difference between Netflix USA and Netflix in Europe diminished. To the point where I stopped using a VPN. And as it turned out in practice, the added benefits of a VPN for "privacy" or "safety" weren't really noticeable. Maybe there is a use case if you buy drugs on the Darknet and want to hide your IP from law enforcement, but for regular and legal use of the internet a VPN at least doesn't seem to make much sense. I am not a tech guy, but there are sources that explain in detail why that is so.

Currently on YouTube there are a lot of videos of content creators talking about their view numbers. Around August 10 many YouTube creators experienced a drop in view numbers, rather significant for some of them. From summer holidays to restricted mode a number of different culprits were blamed for that, until some more tech savvy people applied the scientific method, created unlisted videos and watched them themselves by different methods to see whether the views were counted. They could show that, as some had suspected, adblockers in fact led to views not being counted. That fit with previous observations that the drop in view numbers had mostly affected views on PCs, not so much on mobile devices, and not so much on short form videos (which have fewer ads and are more often viewed on mobile devices). But beyond adblockers, other types of software that messed with user identification also had the same effect of not counting views. And that includes VPN.

Now the drop in views doesn't affect ad revenues, probably because the ads weren't shown due to the adblockers anyway. But content creators have sponsoring contracts, and the sponsors pay in function of the number of views a video get, and that does lead to loss of revenue. The irony here is that some of the biggest sponsors on YouTube are VPN companies like Surfshark. By persuading their audience to install a VPN, the influencers ultimately reduced their own revenue. Not as bad as the Honey scam from end of last year, but still ironic. Especially if the advertising for the VPN promises benefits that aren't all that important as those sponsors want to make you believe. The drop in views seems to be related to YouTube cracking down on adblockers and bots. But expect more tech channels in future to explain to you why you *shouldn't* install a VPN.

- posted by Tobold @ 8:05 AM Permanent Link
Comments:
I'm already beginning to see "please consider turning off your ad blocker on our channel" messages from content creators because of this.
# posted by Blogger Bigeye : 20/9/25 11:22
 
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