A few weeks ago the Online Safety Act went into effect in the UK forcing many types of websites to verify the age of surfers before giving them access.
The idea was to protect minors online, but lots of people didn't like needing to show an ID to browse the web and many found a good alternative - browse the web with a VPN.
Ever since, downloads and revenue of the top VPN apps in the UK are at an all-time high.
Right now, there are several VPN apps at the top of the UK App Store: Proton VPN, NordVPN, VPN - Super unlimited Proxy, VPN.org, and Surfshark.
Looking at daily downloads for the last 30 days it's very clear when things changed:
Combined downloads of the group went from roughly 14K/day to nearly 70K/day! While downloads have dropped a bit since peaking at the end of July, they're still significantly higher than where they started.
One interesting thing I noticed is that even though this started in late July on the App Store, downloads on Google Play just started rising a few days ago. I'm not entirely sure why, but it's clear people have figured out a way around this and VPNs are raking it in.
And speaking of money...
According to our estimates, revenue has been on the rise just as well.
The group saw revenue rising from around $54K/day of net revenue to a peak of $268K in a single day during the last week of July - a 5x jump almost overnight!
The revenue trend declined fairly quickly, but even at its lowest point last Tuesday, it was still more than 3x higher than where it started.
VPNs are an interesting class of apps which has a few big brand name like Nord VPN and Express VPN but also a slew of no-name apps that rely solely on organic discovery in the App Store and Apple Ads.
I expect competition to increase in both in the UK.
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