To their credit, this review site also helpfully included an advertising disclosure in their footer. On their homepage they prominently list 10 providers as the “best” VPN services, in this order: Let’s look at one of these “review” sites for example, which will go unnamed for the purposes of this article. Ranking providers like this only serves as an easy way to guide users to a certain choice (in this case, the choice that will make the reviewers the most money). So here’s my issue with ranking VPN providers: Let’s face it, VPN providers are all offering the same service, and they will either protect your information or they won’t. These sites have supposedly done all the work for you, so you can just click and go, assured you’re making the right choices. One common thing I’ll see on these sites is a ranked list of providers that are ostensibly the best ones to choose from. Lots of sites like these will claim they’re acting in your best interest, but they’re just here to make money. I’m really looking to take the time here and identify “the bad” sites and resources that use these techniques to profit off a community just looking for reliable answers.
The key is transparency: Their advertisements should look like advertisements, and nothing else. In fact, many of the VPN providers we recommend on Privacy Guides engage in responsible advertising across various platforms. This isn’t going to be a lengthy blog post on advertising being bad, far from it. From a consumer’s point of view, affiliate marketing and other paid promotional techniques like this make it near impossible to know when a review is genuine or not. When a seemingly “unbiased review” on a site is merely a paid advertisement in disguise, that website is breaking their reader’s trust.
Some of them are even operated by VPN providers themselves, operating under anonymous business entities to hide their bias, or doing it right out in the open, hoping you’ll mistake their advertising-filled press releases and blogs as insider knowledge of the VPN space.
These websites often employ marketing teams to make sure their “reviews” are what you see first when you begin your research. Websites, social media accounts, and other platforms are constantly popping up out of nowhere, telling you to buy The Greatest Service Ever in order to solve all your privacy woes, whatever that may be. There’s a massive problem in the privacy world. The Trouble with VPN and Privacy Review Sites ¶
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