THE GROWING...longer available on the App Store for unknown reasons. App Store performance Total...
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YouTube views 1.28 M 792 K 1.24 M 349 K 356 K 7.7 K 512 K 189 K 198 K 63 K NordVPN ExpressVPN Hotspot Shield PIA HideMyAss TunnelBear IPVanish CyberGhost VyprVPN PureVPN 97 K 47 K 4.1 M 1 M 53 K 76 K 26 K 39 K 12 K 70 K Facebook likes NordVPN ExpressVPN Hotspot Shield PIA HideMyAss TunnelBear IPVanish CyberGhost VyprVPN PureVPN Ahrefs Organic Website Visitors 1.6 M 2.5 M 1.3 M 849 K 1.6 M 651 K 372 K 495 K 114 K 719 K NordVPN ExpressVPN Hotspot Shield PIA HideMyAss TunnelBear IPVanish CyberGhost VyprVPN PureVPN Ahrefs Traffic Value Ahrefs Organic Traffic $1.8 M $2.5 M $784 K $936 K $798 K $816 K $662 K $559 K $126 K $548 K SimilarWeb Website Visitors NordVPN ExpressVPN Hotspot Shield PIA HideMyAss TunnelBear IPVanish CyberGhost VyprVPN PureVPN 16.5 M 4.8 M 4.5 M 3.4 M 4.7 M 4.9 M 5.7 M 2.2 M 2.6 M Twitter followers NordVPN ExpressVPN Hotspot Shield PIA HideMyAss TunnelBear IPVanish CyberGhost VyprVPN PureVPN 19.8 K 19 K 95.5 K 148 K 192 K 16.7 K 12.1 K 12.7 K 10 K 0.6 K The biggest players in our VPN market research 1.29 M 872 K 1.05 M 542 K 516 K 828 K 545 K 634 K 180 K 280 K NordVPN ExpressVPN Hotspot Shield PIA HideMyAss TunnelBear IPVanish CyberGhost VyprVPN PureVPN ” “ Which VPN is dominating the market? Trying to answer that question by looking at VPN review sites alone is misleading. The most popular VPN by branded search terms When putting all the branded search terms together, we see that NordVPN has the most branded searches per month of any VPN. Hotspot Shield (a free VPN) comes in second, followed by ExpressVPN. The lowest total branded searches is for VyprVPN. We're looking at 5 non-branded, high-intent search terms in 5 different countries to see which VPN brand ranks the highest for them. Using Google Trends, we're going to look at which brands have the biggest increase in interest for their main branded keyword, relative to the other VPN brands. We're looking at how many people are searching for the brand's name each month. Using Ahrefs, we'll look at 3 terms: the brand name, a variation, and a high-intent branded search. The most popular VPN by high-intent keywords nordvpn NordVPN nord vpn nordvpn review Keyword Keyword Keyword 868 000 368 000 62 000 ExpressVPN expressvpn express vpn expressvpn review Keyword Keyword Keyword 465 000 386 000 21 000 Hotspot Shield Hotspot shield Hotspotshield Hotspot shield review Keyword Keyword Keyword 998 000 47 000 12 000 Private internet access Pia vpn Private internet access review Keyword Keyword Keyword 998 000 47 000 12 000 Private Internet Access Hide my ass HMA Keyword Keyword Hidemyass Keyword 264 000 138 000 114 000 HideMyAss tunnelbear tunnel bear tunnelbear review Keyword Keyword Keyword 637 000 171 000 20 000 TunnelBear ipvanish ip vanish ipvanish review Keyword Keyword Keyword 462 000 56 000 27 000 IPVanish cyberghost cyber ghost cyberghost review Keyword Keyword Keyword 550 000 70 000 14 000 CyberGhost vyprvpn vyprvpn review Keyword vypr vpn Keyword Keyword 161 000 13 000 6 000 VyprVPN purevpn review purevpn Keyword pure vpn Keyword Keyword 204 000 59 000 17 000 PureVPN The winner The winner Branded search term breakdown The official brand name (such as “expressvpn”) A higher-intent keyword, usually the brand name plus “review” (such as “expressvpn review”) 1 3 A commonly misspelled or spaced variation (such as “express vpn”) 2 Our research puts NordVPN at the top in terms of global searches, as well as searches from the lucrative US market. It stands head and shoulders above the other competitors. NordVPN ranks higher than any other VPN brand for high-intent keywords in these 5 important countries. However, the battle was almost even between NordVPN and ExpressVPN. The VPN with the biggest increase in interest Keyword/ Country USA Russia UK Australia Turkey best vpn ExpressVPN NordVPN ExpressVPN ExpressVPN NordVPN free vpn NordVPN NordVPN NordVPN NordVPN NordVPN vpn for pc ExpressVPN NordVPN NordVPN NordVPN NordVPN vpn for mac ExpressVPN ExpressVPN Hotspot Shield Hotspot Shield ExpressVPN vpn for android ExpressVPN NordVPN NordVPN ExpressVPN NordVPN The VPN with the biggest server count momentum 2016 2017 2018 % increase NordVPN 724 1103 5079 601.52% ExpressVPN 136 1500 2000 1370.59% Hotspot Shield N/A 200 2500 1150% Private Internet Access N/A 3000 3180 6.00% HideMyAss 940 760 880 -6.38% TunnelBear N/A N/A N/A N/A IPvanish 600 950 1100 83.33% CyberGhost 600 1305 3134 422.33% VyprVPN 700 700 700 0% PureVPN 500 750 2000 300.00% The VPN with the best social media presence The VPN with the best app installs and ratings We're taking a look at each VPN's apps on the US Google Play and Apple App Store. We're seeing which brand has the most installs and highest average ratings on those two platforms. Google Play installs and ratings NordVPN ExpressVPN Hotspot Shield PIA HideMyAss TunnelBear IPVanish CyberGhost VyprVPN PureVPN 445.6 K 101 K 56.1 K 22.1 K 74.3 K 77.1 K 28.9 K 13.3 K 10.9 K 1 M 4.4 4.1 4.0 3.9 4.5 3.5 4.3 4.2 3.4 Google Play installs Google Play ratings 4.5 App Store installs and ratings NordVPN ExpressVPN Hotspot Shield PIA HideMyAss TunnelBear IPVanish CyberGhost VyprVPN PureVPN 73.1 K 4.5 752 K 33.5 K 16 K 12.9 K 32.2 K 8.4 K 22.6 K 3 K 0 App Store ratings App Store installs 4.5 4.5 4.5 4.5 4.5 4.5 4.5 4.5 The winner The VPN with the most valuable website visitors We’re looking at how many estimated monthly visitors each VPN brand’s website has. For this research on VPNs market share, we're using estimates from SimilarWeb and Ahrefs. We are looking at each VPN’s Facebook, Twitter and YouTube average views to determine their social media presence and popularity. In our market research, we excluded less-popular platforms like Instagram or Pinterest. Total global branded search volume The winner The winner While Hotspot Shield had an interest spike around May, it was quickly overtaken by NordVPN. Our research shows that this brand had the greatest momentum in the last year. While ExpressVPN's relative growth is great, it pales in comparison to NordVPN's current offering and 3-year growth. It's likely that 2019 and beyond will be dominated by NordVPN, if their current growth stays the same. Hotspot Shield has more mobile installs than any other VPN provider. However, since it's a free VPN, this has less significance. The most installs for a paid VPN goes to NordVPN. NordVPN had almost 4 million more website visitors than #2 ExpressVPN. Both of these are at least 4x as popular as the other VPN websites. Looking at the estimates for each site's monthly organic traffic and its value, we see that ExpressVPN dominates with 2.5 million in both visitors and dollars. Runner-up NordVPN has traffic worth $1.8 million, while VyprVPN has the lowest value visitors worth $126,000. We're looking at the server counts for the last 3 years. TunnelBear's couldn't be determined, while Hotspot and PIA only have data for the past 2 years. The winner Hotspot Shield has the best overall social media presence. Other VPNs' social media followers pale in comparison, while NordVPN beats Hotspot for average YouTube views. The winner ExpressVPN brings in more valuable web traffic than any other VPN brand here. This is one of the most important metrics in our research on VPN market share: money. While NordVPN has 4 million more overall website visitors, Express still wins when it comes to the monetary value. NordVPN IPVanish CyberGhost VyprVPN PureVPN Hotspot Shield ExpressVPN Private Internet Access HideMyAss TunnelBear Hotspot Shield and Private Internet Access (PIA) have a surprisingly large number of Facebook likes, more than 10x bigger than the #3, NordVPN. It's important to note, however, that Hotspot Shield and NordVPN have much better average engagement on their posts than PIA does. Page performance The numbers for Twitter are similar to that of Facebook above. The only exception here is that TunnelBear has the most followers, and PIA beats Hotspot Shield. At the lowest end, PureVPN doesn't even have 1,000 followers yet. Twitter performance We looked at the average of each brand's 5 most popular videos by views on their YouTube channel. NordVPN is slightly better than Hotspot Shield here, while TunnelBear's views are almost non-existent. We're not looking at brand's sponsored videos here, however. YouTube performance When it comes to Android clients on the Google Play store, we see that Hotspot Shield has unsur- prisingly the highest number of app installs. NordVPN beats the other free VPN (TunnelBear), and it's followed by ExpressVPN. The least popular is PureVPN. Play performance Hotspot Shield has far-and-away the most installs on the App Store, more than 10x NordVPN's installs. This is unsurprising for a free VPN, but again TunnelBear is not the second-most popular. Instead, it's only 4th. On another note, PureVPN is no longer available on the App Store for unknown reasons. App Store performance Total monthly traffic Organic traffic value Presented by: VPNpro.com VPNpro That's why we're looking at the 7 most important marketing metrics for popular VPN providers to determine which one is dominating the VPN market. We analyzed 100 brands, both free and paid, in our VPN market share research and cut our list down to these 10 VPN providers. PIA Who is dominating VPN MARKET THE GROWING right now? VPNpro 20.2 M
Transcript of THE GROWING...longer available on the App Store for unknown reasons. App Store performance Total...
YouTube views
1.28 M
792 K
1.24 M
349 K 356 K
7.7 K
512 K
189 K 198 K
63 K
NordVPN ExpressVPN Hotspot Shield PIA HideMyAss TunnelBear IPVanish CyberGhost VyprVPN PureVPN
97 K
47 K
4.1 M
1 M
53 K
76 K
26 K
39 K
12 K
70 K
Facebook likes
NordVPN ExpressVPN Hotspot Shield PIA HideMyAss TunnelBear IPVanish CyberGhost VyprVPN PureVPN
Ahrefs Organic Website Visitors
1.6 M
2.5 M
1.3 M
849 K
1.6 M
651 K
372 K495 K
114 K
719 K
NordVPN ExpressVPN Hotspot Shield PIA HideMyAss TunnelBear IPVanish CyberGhost VyprVPN PureVPN
Ahrefs Traffic Value
Ahrefs Organic Traffic
$1.8 M
$2.5 M
$784 K
$936 K$798 K $816 K
$662 K$559 K
$126 K
$548 K
SimilarWeb Website Visitors
NordVPN ExpressVPN Hotspot Shield PIA HideMyAss TunnelBear IPVanish CyberGhost VyprVPN PureVPN
16.5 M
4.8 M 4.5 M3.4 M
4.7 M4.9 M
5.7 M
2.2 M 2.6 M
Twitter followers
NordVPN ExpressVPN Hotspot Shield PIA HideMyAss TunnelBear IPVanish CyberGhost VyprVPN PureVPN
19.8 K 19 K
95.5 K
148 K
192 K
16.7 K 12.1 K 12.7 K 10 K0.6 K
The biggest players inour VPN market research
1.29 M
872 K
1.05 M
542 K 516 K
828 K
545 K634 K
180 K
280 K
NordVPN ExpressVPN Hotspot Shield PIA HideMyAss TunnelBear IPVanish CyberGhost VyprVPN PureVPN
”“ Which VPN is dominating the market?
Trying to answer that question by looking at VPN review sites alone is misleading.
The most popular VPNby branded search terms
When putting all the branded search terms together, we see that NordVPN has the most branded searches per month of any VPN. Hotspot Shield (a free VPN) comes in second, followed by ExpressVPN. The lowest total branded searches is for VyprVPN.
We're looking at 5 non-branded, high-intent search terms in 5 different countries to see which VPN brand ranks the highest for them.
Using Google Trends, we're going to look at which brands have the biggest increase in interest for their main branded keyword, relative to the other VPN brands.
We're looking at how many people are searching for the brand's name each month. Using Ahrefs, we'll look at 3 terms: the brand name, a variation, and a high-intent branded search.
The most popular VPN by high-intent keywords
nordvpn
NordVPN
nord vpn
nordvpn review
Keyword Keyword
Keyword
868 000 368 000
62 000
ExpressVPN
expressvpn express vpn
expressvpn review
Keyword Keyword
Keyword
465 000 386 000
21 000
Hotspot Shield
Hotspot shield Hotspotshield
Hotspot shield review
Keyword Keyword
Keyword
998 000 47 000
12 000
Private internetaccess Pia vpn
Private internet access review
KeywordKeyword
Keyword
998 000 47 000
12 000
Private Internet Access
Hide my ass
HMA
Keyword
Keyword
HidemyassKeyword
264 000 138 000
114 000
HideMyAss
tunnelbear tunnel bear
tunnelbear review
Keyword Keyword
Keyword
637 000 171 000
20 000
TunnelBear
ipvanish ip vanish
ipvanish review
Keyword Keyword
Keyword
462 000 56 000
27 000
IPVanish
cyberghost cyber ghost
cyberghost review
Keyword Keyword
Keyword
550 000 70 000
14 000
CyberGhost
vyprvpn
vyprvpn review
Keywordvypr vpnKeyword
Keyword
161 000 13 000
6 000
VyprVPN
purevpn review
purevpnKeyword
pure vpnKeyword
Keyword
204 000 59 000
17 000
PureVPN
The winner
The winner
Branded search term breakdown
The official brand name (such as “expressvpn”)
A higher-intent keyword, usually the brand name plus “review” (such as “expressvpn review”)
1 3
A commonly misspelled or spaced variation (such as “express vpn”)
2
Our research puts NordVPN at the top in terms of global searches, as well as searches from the lucrative US market. It stands head and shoulders above the other competitors.
NordVPN ranks higher than any other VPN brand for high-intent keywords in these 5 important countries. However, the battle was almost even between NordVPN and ExpressVPN.
The VPN with the biggestincrease in interest
Keyword/ Country USA Russia UK Australia Turkey
best vpn ExpressVPN NordVPN ExpressVPN ExpressVPN NordVPN
free vpn NordVPN NordVPN NordVPN NordVPN NordVPN
vpn for pc ExpressVPN NordVPN NordVPN NordVPN NordVPN
vpn for mac ExpressVPN ExpressVPN Hotspot Shield Hotspot Shield ExpressVPN
vpn for android ExpressVPN NordVPN NordVPN ExpressVPN NordVPN
The VPN with the biggest server count momentum
2016 2017 2018 % increase
NordVPN 724 1103 5079 601.52%
ExpressVPN 136 1500 2000 1370.59%
Hotspot Shield N/A 200 2500 1150%
Private Internet Access N/A 3000 3180 6.00%
HideMyAss 940 760 880 -6.38%
TunnelBear N/A N/A N/A N/A
IPvanish 600 950 1100 83.33%
CyberGhost 600 1305 3134 422.33%
VyprVPN 700 700 700 0%
PureVPN 500 750 2000 300.00%
The VPN with the best social media presence
The VPN with the best app installs and ratings
We're taking a look at each VPN's apps on the US Google Play and Apple App Store. We're seeing which brand has the most installs and highest average ratings on those two platforms.
Google Play installs and ratings
NordVPN ExpressVPN Hotspot Shield PIA HideMyAss TunnelBear IPVanish CyberGhost VyprVPN PureVPN
445.6 K
101 K
56.1 K
22.1 K
74.3 K 77.1 K
28.9 K13.3 K 10.9 K
1 M
4.4
4.14.0
3.9
4.5
3.5
4.3
4.2
3.4
Google Play installs
Google Play ratings
4.5
App Store installs and ratings
NordVPN ExpressVPN Hotspot Shield PIA HideMyAss TunnelBear IPVanish CyberGhost VyprVPN PureVPN
73.1 K
4.5
752 K
33.5 K
16 K12.9 K
32.2 K
8.4 K
22.6 K
3 K0
App Store ratings
App Store installs
4.5 4.5 4.5 4.5 4.5 4.54.54.5
The winner
The VPN with the mostvaluable website visitors
We’re looking at how many estimated monthly visitors each VPN brand’s website has. For this research on VPNs market share, we're using estimates from SimilarWeb and Ahrefs.
We are looking at each VPN’s Facebook, Twitter and YouTube average views to determine their social media presence and popularity. In our market research, we excluded less-popular platforms like Instagram or Pinterest.
Total global branded search volume
The winner
The winnerWhile Hotspot Shield had an interest spike around May, it was quickly overtaken by NordVPN. Our research shows that this brand had the greatest momentum in the last year.
While ExpressVPN's relative growth is great, it pales in comparison to NordVPN's current offering and 3-year growth. It's likely that 2019 and beyond will be dominated by NordVPN, if their current growth stays the same.
Hotspot Shield has more mobile installs than any other VPN provider. However, since it's a free VPN, this has less significance. The most installs for a paid VPN goes to NordVPN.
NordVPN had almost 4 million more website visitors than #2 ExpressVPN. Both of these are at least 4x as popular as the other VPN websites.
Looking at the estimates for each site's monthly organic traffic and its value, we see that ExpressVPN dominates with 2.5 million in both visitors and dollars. Runner-up NordVPN has traffic worth $1.8 million, while VyprVPN has the lowest value visitors worth $126,000.
We're looking at the server counts for the last 3 years. TunnelBear's couldn't be determined, while Hotspot and PIA only have data for the past 2 years.
The winnerHotspot Shield has the best overall social media presence. Other VPNs' social media followers pale in comparison, while NordVPN beats Hotspot for average YouTube views.
The winnerExpressVPN brings in more valuable web traffic than any other VPN brand here. This is one of the most important metrics in our research on VPN market share: money. While NordVPN has 4 million more overall website visitors, Express still wins when it comes to the monetary value.
NordVPN
IPVanish CyberGhost VyprVPN PureVPN
Hotspot Shield ExpressVPN Private Internet Access HideMyAss
TunnelBear
Hotspot Shield and Private Internet Access (PIA) have a surprisingly large number of Facebook likes, more than 10x bigger than the #3, NordVPN. It's important to note, however, that Hotspot Shield and NordVPN have much better average engagement on their posts than PIA does.
Page performance
The numbers for Twitter are similar to that of Facebook above. The only exception here is that TunnelBear has the most followers, and PIA beats Hotspot Shield. At the lowest end, PureVPN doesn't even have 1,000 followers yet.
Twitter performance
We looked at the average of each brand's 5 most popular videos by views on their YouTube channel. NordVPN is slightly better than Hotspot Shield here, while TunnelBear's views are almost non-existent. We're not looking at brand's sponsored videos here, however.
YouTube performance
When it comes to Android clients on the Google Play store, we see that Hotspot Shield has unsur-prisingly the highest number of app installs. NordVPN beats the other free VPN (TunnelBear), and it's followed by ExpressVPN. The least popular is PureVPN.
Play performance
Hotspot Shield has far-and-away the most installs on the App Store, more than 10x NordVPN's installs. This is unsurprising for a free VPN, but again TunnelBear is not the second-most popular. Instead, it's only 4th. On another note, PureVPN is no longer available on the App Store for unknown reasons.
App Store performance
Total monthly traffic
Organic traffic value
Presented by:
VPNpro.com VPNpro
That's why we're looking at the 7 most important marketing metrics for popular VPN providers to determine which one is dominating the
VPN market. We analyzed 100 brands, both free and paid, in our VPN market share research and cut our list down to these 10 VPN providers.
PIA
Who is dominating
VPN MARKETTHE GROWING
right now?
VPNpro
20.2 M
