They’re paying for a portion of your attention. They’re slowly building an association with their product such that when you finally get around to buying say a VPN subscription your first thought is “Nord.”

It’s not going to affect everyone the same, for instance my thoughts on VPNs are “anything but Nord”; but they only need a fraction of users to develop a positive association with their brand.

All according to plan, I fear. They’d ideally have all subreddits under the management of their cadre of “power mods”