Posted on 10/21/2023 9:43:02 AM PDT by DoodleBob
Each year we have more privacy violations and security breaches. And each year, VPN popularity grows with them.
To keep track of all the changes, we decided to collect the most sought-after VPN statistics and put them under a single roof. Below, you’ll find the most recent information about VPN users, popularity, market size, and legality.
The average cost of a VPN varies from company to company. Any product that belongs to more popular brands costs an average of $3.69 a month for their discounted 1-3 year deals. Regarding monthly prices without discounts, it averages at $10.45.
People in the world | Internet users | VPN users |
|---|---|---|
7.98 billion | 5.37 billion | 1.6 billion |
There are 8 billion people in the world (the number grew slightly, but world-record-significantly by the time this article got published). Over 5 billion (67.3%) of them are internet users. Out of these, we estimate that there are over 1.6 billion (31% of all internet users) people who use VPNs – that’s a fifth of the world’s population!
However, these numbers are approximate because they only account for countries where VPN market penetration is above 10%. Market penetration measures how much a service is used compared to the total estimated market. So, the total number of VPN users is likely higher.
A significant chunk (around 50%) of all VPN users use only free VPN services. However, free VPNs are rarely safe. They don’t offer online security or privacy but sell users’ data to maintain their services.
The high percentage of free-only users suggests that a free VPN user’s intent is not security but accessing geo-restricted content.
The top 3 biggest markets by country are all in Asia: India, China, and Indonesia.
Why Asia? We guess that it’s due to two factors:
These two factors also suggest that VPNs aren’t going anywhere. The global population will only rise and, considering the number of data leaks, internet shutdowns, and hacks happening yearly, privacy will only decline. Considering this, it’s little surprise that the VPN market is projected at nearly $76 billion by 2027.
VPNs have a peculiar relationship with popularity. If we look at the global Google search volumes, the interest in VPNs peaked a few times in the last two decades: in 2004, 2019, and 2022.
So, what happened? VPNs started as workplace tools. They allowed people to remotely access and protect their shared business resources. Recently, their popularity declined due to better and more convenient cloud solutions. So, we see that the general interest in VPNs peaked in 2004 and then started to decline until 2012.
Around this time, the first VPNs for personal use were released. The privacy concerns were further fueled about a year later (June 2013) when Edward Snowden shared NSA documents with the public.
While the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2019 gave VPN interest a boost, it was 2022 that made it go sky-high. Between the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the protests in Iran, there are suddenly a lot more people interested in secure communications.
Who is a VPN user? There are many ways to answer this question, but for our customer survey, we only used a few demographic stats:
So, the majority (54%) of VPN users are men, though the difference isn’t that significant. A more interesting split appears when we look at the ages of our users.
VPNs are mostly used by Millenials: around 1 in 5 users aged between 25 and 34 said they used a VPN. Gen Z, the generation that doesn’t even remember the internet not being commonplace, used VPNs less than Millenials, with only 16.5% of people aged between 16 and 24 claiming VPN use.
While some say this disparity comes from Gen Z being a lot more used and thus relaxed about the internet, a more pertinent argument is that some Gen Zs are still underage and therefore can’t afford to use one.
A VPN is primarily a privacy tool, but it serves many functions. We wanted to find out the primary reasons why people use VPNs. So we looked at Google Trends to identify the following reasons why customers use a VPN:
We analyzed 5 VPN use cases: work, security, gaming, travel, and privacy. Out of them, people were the most interested in VPNs for work, accounting for 4 out of 10 such searches in 2022 on average. This was followed by VPNs for security and gaming, both accounting for around 25% of global searches.
Searches in the US follow the same pattern in terms of use case popularity. People in the US googled VPNs for work even harder, their searches making up around 45% of total US searches. VPNs for security accounted for a fourth, and gaming accounted for a fifth of US searches.
Of course, just because people are interested in VPNs for work doesn’t mean they’re using them solely for work purposes. Here’s how the VPN use breaks down:
4 out of 10 people use a VPN for personal reasons only, which could range from privacy and security to overcoming content blocks.
On the other hand, 3 out of 10 people use a VPN for business. This could also imply that some people only encounter a VPN at work.
Lastly, 23.1% — or less than 1 in 4 — said they mix business and pleasure: they use a VPN for both business and personal reasons.
While a VPN could potentially stay always on, not every VPN user does so. That’s why data on how frequently people use VPNs is interesting:
More than a third of users (36%) use VPNs every day. However, even more (41%) use them sparingly, at least once a week. So that’s 64% of the VPN-user populace that doesn’t use it daily.
This may support the claim that people are most interested in overcoming content blocks — assuming that’s when people who don’t use VPNs daily switch them on — with security and privacy being a lot more important to only 1 in 3 people.
It’s hard to say how many cyberattacks happen yearly because not all are successful or reported. However, here’s how many victims were affected by cybercrime each year in the US from 2015 to 2021:
Nearly half a million people (496,501) fell victim to cybercrime in the US in 2021. That’s 1,360 victims per day.
Still, this is an improvement over 2020, which saw massive growth in attacks over 2019, with 1481 cyberattack victims per day.
The curve may be going down as all the nasty Covid-19 scams are losing their potency while the people and the institutions are getting smarter.
VPNs are legal in most places around the world. That said, legal doesn’t necessarily mean entirely free of danger and hassle to use.
Around 45% of internet users live in countries that restrict VPN usage one way or another. That’s 2.4 billion people.
Here’s a list of countries restricting VPN use:
Country | VPN status |
|---|---|
Belarus | Currently restricted |
China | Currently restricted |
Egypt | Currently restricted |
India | Currently restricted |
Iran | Currently restricted |
Iraq | Currently restricted |
Myanmar | Currently restricted |
Oman | Currently restricted |
Pakistan | Currently restricted |
Russia | Currently restricted |
Tanzania | Currently restricted |
The U.A.E. | Currently restricted |
tURKEY | Currently restricted |
Turkmenistan | Currently restricted |
Uganda | Restricted in the past |
For more details on what those restrictions entail, read our summary.
From privacy to security, from cybercrime to accessing blocked parts of the internet, there are many reasons to use a VPN. However, a large part of the population doesn’t. Why is that the case? This is what the research reveals:
As mentioned in the report — which allowed for multiple answers — 6 out of 10 respondents said that they don’t use a VPN because they don’t need one. Reasons such as price, lack of obvious benefits, or trouble setting it up each scored about 20% of the audience.
Crucially for VPN developers, 7% of answers included a lack of trust in secure VPNs. This is one of the reasons why Surfshark carries out independent auditing. It also compels us to cover educational topics like whether VPNs can be tracked.
One interesting aspect of VPN use is the device choice. While premium VPNs like Surfshark are available on most platforms, not everyone uses them like that. As such, here’s how the usage-by-platform stats shake out:
Somewhat surprisingly, smartphone and PC/laptop use seems equally widespread (64% and 62%). Smartphones aren’t the premier platforms for streaming or downloading files. One could theorize that privacy and the ability to bypass local firewalls matter a lot to their users. On the other hand, with laptops and PCs not lacking in power, almost all VPN use cases apply to them.
A fifth of users install a VPN on their tablets – while they’re not as portable as phones or powerful as laptops, a lot of people still use them daily. The rest of the devices — smart TVs, consoles, and so on — only constitute around 10% each.
And while only 8% of users install a VPN on a router, that’s still 1 in 10 users taking the not-uncomplicated step of doing that. This may show the technical sophistication of some of the VPN customer crowd.
From search interest about VPNs to the constantly-expanding VPN market, we see a growing worry about individual privacy each year. People feel like they cannot trust organizations and governments to protect their data. A lot of the time, these institutions are the reasons people turn to privacy tools like Surfshark VPN and Incogni.com.
The projected growth of the VPN market suggests that things are unlikely to get better anytime soon. Our lives are becoming more digitized, which causes the number of cyberthreats to grow. The solution? Use cybersecurity tools and form good browsing habits
Interesting they didn’t look at usage by Baby Boomers. I’m in that crowd and use a VPN on my devices. I use a Synology router that makes it easy to install a VPN on it, but I decided to go with device level VPN.
Last week, for the first time ever, a web site told me to disable my VPN if I wanted to browse their site. I can’t remember what site it was.
If a VPN is “free” that means you’re the product.
Does the VPN protect from your household data being sold by your utility co? That 5G and mesh grid is collecting EVERYTHING it can.
That’s happened a lot recently…before my VPN fell overboard into that lake with everyone’s guns.
From the fridge, dishwasher, AC?
I use it to watch Polish TV series, I also used it to watch “The Ashes” Cricket tournament between Australia and England.
My online bank used to be inaccessible if I was using a NordVPN server outside the US, but lately that’s not been an issue. I’m surprised the website was able to tell you were using a VPN. My guess is that some websites may know of some of the most commonly used VPN server IPs and be able to block them. Does anyone more knowledgeable know how a website can block a VPN and if there are steps around that?
How easy is it to detect if a VPN is being used?
Gotta love that site name! I must say "Bleeping [computer][phone][tablet][web site]" ten times a day
Using a VPN will definitely impact your Internet user experience - and how much info about you the VPN companies are required to funnel straight to the Feds is still unclear.
“I’m surprised the website was able to tell you were using a VPN.”
Because of the VPN protocols. Something else folks don’t know. They can see and collect your device ID also. Device identification is becoming a very common “security feature” as they label it. It is not, it is a spy tool.
Yahoo News and YouTube have been telling me to disable VPN
I’ll just not visit their site
Internet is becoming complicated and I’m losing interest in it
I’m no longer compelled to search all day long looking for the end of the internet
No problems with YouTube for me. I use ExpressVPN.
The ads on so many web sites are so overwhelming that you cannot read the content. The Safari “Reader” view usually does the trick for me and I get clean, ad-free pages. If that fails, then the Brave browser usually works.
“”””Yahoo News and YouTube have been telling me to disable VPN I’ll just not visit their site
Internet is becoming complicated and I’m losing interest in it I’m no longer compelled to search all day long looking for the end of the internet””””
Did I say shallow? Search is close to becoming useless since the deeper sources and materials seem to have been retired into a distant vault while the shallow PC/woke versions are front and center and articles have great titles with no real content, everything is written like articles in women’s magazines and the women’s section of the old newspapers, even the nationwide subject matter today is very female.
It is probably more fun than ever for those wanting a quick connection to bloggers and podcasts that tell them exactly what they want to hear, about literally everything though.
Hilarious
I tried going to their website on my VPN and “1007” blocked me
No problem
I dropped their site into “https://12ft.io“
Full Access
It’s the combination of Firefox, ghostery and Express VPN
There are ways to anonymous surf and bypass
Interesting and good info. Thanks for posting it.
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