How does this work? They harvest your DNS! They inject surveys into your YouTube packets. They tabulate just how much traffic goes to which specific games on Twitch. How? The provider is the endpoint, not you.
It's not the whole picture, but it's enough to sell to marketers.
This is what happens EVERY time I say this! Look again! It happened, I have 1 upvote... It's almost as if the VPN companies don't want you to believe this is true!
Story time! I have been cashed out of three startups. $600 total, across them all. It's the people in the Valley who've struck out over and over who know the truth, not the successes.
One of those startups was about tracking the games played on Twitch, and selling that info to Esports entities, marketing firms, etc. The company did not succeed because, honestly, it's not hard data to scrape yourself. BUT, we tried. And where did we get our data? VPN providers. Major VPN providers. We don't care about your personal data. We care about whether you watched a Twitch stream of GTA or Madden.
And for a time, yes, we could buy injected surveys. Packets, literally injected into your streams of data. This was expensive, iffy, and controversial, but it was on the rate cards.
DNS is very useful, and unencrypted. OpenDNS makes its money on this same info. Stop putting your heads in the sand. Ya'll have seriously lost the path.
How does this work? They harvest your DNS! They inject surveys into your YouTube packets. They tabulate just how much traffic goes to which specific games on Twitch. How? The provider is the endpoint, not you.
It's not the whole picture, but it's enough to sell to marketers.
This is what happens EVERY time I say this! Look again! It happened, I have 1 upvote... It's almost as if the VPN companies don't want you to believe this is true!
Story time! I have been cashed out of three startups. $600 total, across them all. It's the people in the Valley who've struck out over and over who know the truth, not the successes.
One of those startups was about tracking the games played on Twitch, and selling that info to Esports entities, marketing firms, etc. The company did not succeed because, honestly, it's not hard data to scrape yourself. BUT, we tried. And where did we get our data? VPN providers. Major VPN providers. We don't care about your personal data. We care about whether you watched a Twitch stream of GTA or Madden.
And for a time, yes, we could buy injected surveys. Packets, literally injected into your streams of data. This was expensive, iffy, and controversial, but it was on the rate cards.
DNS is very useful, and unencrypted. OpenDNS makes its money on this same info. Stop putting your heads in the sand. Ya'll have seriously lost the path.