How Many VPN UsersThis is a question I always wanted to have an answer since I started writing for How-to-hide-ip.net. Indeed, it would be interesting to find out the number of VPN users. There’s plenty of reasons why having those figures matters.

Why the number of VPN users matters?

First of all,

  • this would give a great indicator for knowing how serious are internet users with regard to the safety of the data they are transferring over the internet.
  • but this will also is a great indicator for knowing which countries are most sensitive to using VPN services. Having these figures would give us an indication of the usage people do on the internet.
  • finally, it will give an idea of how accessible VPN services can be.

Well, those are only a few reasons, but depending on your standpoint, there may be other reasons for finding out those figures. If you are a VPN provider, this will give you a good grasp of the market. If you are a simple internet user, this will give you an idea of the number of people who have opted for a VPN service for securing some of their internet transaction- this will surely leave you wondering why they have to do so.

So what do we know so far?

What we’ve noticed is that there’s a lot of offerings in the VPN area. While VPN has mainly been a professional service geared toward big companies with different branches, more specific uses have raised for the SOHO office as well as the simple internet user. Here, on how-to-hide-ip, we tend to focus on the latter category since our users want to chose themselves their VPN solution for their own needs, not for the whole company’s IT system (this is a very different industry).

As I went on the internet searching for figures (I must also admit that I didn’t spend hours searching for it), the most precise figure I could find out was the 700 000 VPN users that Sweden has. This figure was mentioned by a study made by a group called Cybernorms, from Lund University. According to that study, that’s 40% more compared to the 500 000 users they have identified two years ago. That same study mentions that 200 000 of these users are aged between 15 to 25 years old. That’s a pretty awesome figure, and very precise: Sweden being the home to the pirate bay file-sharing platform, one can understand why there’s such a high number of young people using VPN services to anonymize their connections.

Crowdsourcing the figures

When I tried to look for similar figures for other countries, my quick-search didn’t really reveal a lot of things. Then, I just said to myself, we’re in the internet age, instead of trying to figure out where to find those figures by myself, why not ask the readers – they may have some figures too already available, or they may have already found some useful resources that deal with that topic.

So, I’m reaching out to how-to-hide-ip readers and ask you to refer us to any online resource (or actual figures – please mention the source) that can give us an idea of the number of VPN users in this world (or in a particular country, city).

Off to you, readers! Let’s share numbers so that we can make this unscientific study a reference in the VPN world 🙂