I would guess it’s a little from column a and a little from column b. First it’s easier to retain a customer esp when you do bonuses for signing up for a year, customer gets used to the VPN, forget the renewal comes round, then instead of shopping around get auto committed to another year with their current provider (Some UK ISPs would also use this tactic, auto renewing 12/18 month contracts so unless you cancelled within a certain window you were stuck with a buyout payment to swap providers, thankfully the industry got slapped down about the practice and I don’t believe any provider does this any more. Sure if you call up and get a reduced price they will tie you into a contract, but if you simply forget you get put into a rolling 30 day contract.)
Second you can get some very useful data monitoring at the network level and not keeping “user logs” for example how often are people from country X connecting to country Y to visit plane ticket sites or like Facebooks VPN to predict what the next hip new thing was so they could get in early. No need to log what each user is doing, just “look” at the network traffic patterns in and out of their servers.
Also there does seem to be fuck tons of money being thrown about when it comes to VPN (look how many YT sponsorships there are as an example)
Second you can get some very useful data monitoring at the network level and not keeping “user logs” for example how often are people from country X connecting to country Y to visit plane ticket sites or like Facebooks VPN to predict what the next hip new thing was so they could get in early. No need to log what each user is doing, just “look” at the network traffic patterns in and out of their servers.
Also there does seem to be fuck tons of money being thrown about when it comes to VPN (look how many YT sponsorships there are as an example)