Connecting The Censored Internet: AnchorFree CEO David Gorodyansky, Mountain View, CA (Part 4)

Sramana Mitra: What was your motivation for raising a second round of funding? Was it related to the censorship market?

David Gorodyansky: In 2008 when we had our second round of money, we did it exactly for that reason. We were already well funded to address the Western market, but we wanted to cater to the emerging market that really needed us.

Sramana Mitra: What did you have to do to your business to address the emerging markets if the business was already growing by word of mouth?

David Gorodyansky: We are not doing anything from a marketing point of view, but we do a lot from our engineering point of view. We are growing our engineering team very rapidly and actually have seven open positions today. We are scaling our server infrastructure.

We have about 9 million monthly users who access us 40 million times a month in order to access 2 billion pages per month. We enable 5 million people to gain access to Google in regions where Google is censored. We enable Facebook access for 2 million to 3 million users a month. Pushing 2 billion pages through HTTPS requires as much bandwidth as eBay.

We have 45 people in our company, but we take on as much bandwidth as eBay. We have to pay for that bandwidth. We are fortunate that we do not have to spend a lot of effort on marketing because our company is growing organically. We are, however, spending a lot on engineering and product.

Sramana Mitra: Let’s talk about your business model. How does an advertising-supported VPN business work?

David Gorodyansky: That has been our model from the beginning. Some of our patents filed in 2005 cover the concept of making consumers private while providing targeted ads. Typically those two things do not go well together.

I am a speaker every year at Yahoo! Business and Human Rights Summit. Privacy advocates, bloggers, Google and Microsoft are always there. Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Google always send their lawyers to the conference. They never send their businesspeople because for those companies privacy is something that is defensive. For us, it is offensive. It is our business model. We have created significant IP around making users private while still targeting relevant ads.

Sramana Mitra: How do you do that?

David Gorodyansky: When the user signs on the first thing that happens is the IP address of the user is thrown out. We do not collect it, and we prevent the ISP and other websites from tracking it by providing an AnchorFree IP address instead. All 9 million of our users look like AnchorFree users to other websites.

Once user identity has been stripped away, they go out and surf the Web like they would any other time. Every page the user visits has cookie targets. If you are searching for furniture on Google, then they can show you furniture ads based on cookie data. We anonymize your identity but allow your cookies to come through. We know contextually that private user 123 is looking at furniture, so we show them furniture ads. We can target ads without violating user privacy.

This segment is part 4 in the series : Connecting The Censored Internet: AnchorFree CEO David Gorodyansky, Mountain View, CA
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