Because there are VPNs with good censorship circumvention tech, and there are VPNs with good privacy guarantees, but I know none which can provide both. What Mullvad offers now is either a decade old stuff which is blocked even by subpar DPI solutions, or a set of (more modern) protocol bridges which are painful to setup and sometimes IP-banned.
Having said that we have clearly prioritized privacy for a long time. For what it's worth we have several censorship improvements on the roadmap. Stay tuned.
On the other hand we ran a very political advertising campaign one-two years ago when we protested a new EU law proposal. We plastered Stockholm's airport in billboards targeting EU politicians and journalists. We published a book and sent copies to several hundred politicians. It was quite a success. Incidentally our office was raided by the Swedish police a month later - the first time in 14 years.
I really appreciate your feedback. Are you able to pinpoint more exactly why you feel that our advertising undermines trust in our brand? Is it simply the fact that we're advertising at all?
Our marketing team works hard to ensure that our advertising doesn't make security guarantees we can't keep, or sell the product through fear-mongering. I feel that we've found a set of advertising messages that work, but clearly it still causes some unease and skepticism.
Perhaps it's simply a worry that we'll change because Mullvad is growing up and is no longer an obscure underdog?
No cash infusion. We've been growing for years, just like many other VPN services. We're still quite a bit smaller than e.g. Nord and Express though.
As for our choice of advertising, we don't run an affiliate program, nor do we want to track our customers through online ads, so we're trying this instead. It's cheaper than you might think.
// Fredrik (cofounder of Mullvad)