While Brave Browser's primary source of income stems from its innovative advertising model, it has diversified its revenue streams by offering value-added services such as VPN and cryptocurrency wallet services.
Read on for more detail on how they generate money and ideas for how they can grow.
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Brave Browser was founded in 2015 by Brendan Eich, co-founder of Mozilla and the creator of JavaScript. It has since received investments from Peter Thiel – himself a co-founder of PayPal and an early investor in Facebook – and his Founders Fund.
The context and timing of the company's beginnings were marked by the growing concerns around privacy and security on the internet. Currently, Brave has around 150 employees.
Brave was the first web browser to integrate Bitcoin into its browser payments system, allowing users to support content creators with Bitcoin directly.
What does Brave Browser do?
Brave Browser is a privacy-focused, fast, and secure web browser. It blocks ads and trackers by default, improving user privacy and speed. Brave also allows users to earn rewards for viewing privacy-respecting ads and provides a way for users to support content creators directly.
How does Brave Browser work?
Brave Browser automatically blocks ads and trackers, slowing web browsing and compromising user privacy. By blocking these elements, Brave delivers faster and more secure web browsing experience to its users. In addition, users can opt-in to view privacy-respecting ads, which are served by Brave, and earn rewards in the form of Basic Attention Tokens (BAT). These rewards can be used to support content creators, tipping or donating to websites or YouTube creators.
How the Brave Browser makes money
Brave Browser makes money from paid search advertising, Brave Search Premium subscriptions, and BAT tokens.
Search advertising
Brave operates privacy-respecting ads (much like Duckduckgo). Users receive rewards for viewing ads in the form of BAT, which is paid for by advertisers.
Premium search
Brave offers users the option to upgrade to a premium version of their search engine, which is ad-free for subscribers.
Brave VPN
Brave VPN is a premium service for users paying a monthly subscription fee. Users get an additional layer of privacy, and Brave gets incremental revenue.
Brave crypto wallet
Brave's integrated crypto wallet is free, but some transactions — like purchases and swaps — may incur a fee. This is how other popular crypto wallets operate, like MetaMask.
BAT tokens
Brave earns revenue through the fees generated by the BAT token used to reward users and support content creators. BAT can be traded — bought and sold — on several top crypto exchanges.
Future growth engine
Brave have many options for growing the business in the future, should they choose to take them. In many regards, Mozilla has already blazed this trail for them with its suite of services.
User base expansion
While millions of people already use Brave, its market share remains small in comparison to Chrome. There's still a vast internet populace to reach.
Acquiring more users in the fiercely competitive browser market will require sustained marketing and more innovative features to raise awareness about the browser and its advantages.
Diversified revenue streams
Currently, Brave primarily makes money from search ads. With the advent of generative AI, how users search could change.
Brave can protect itself from changing consumer expectations with more premium services, developing business-specific offerings, or finding novel ways to leverage its privacy-first ethos and technology.
Integrate generative AI
Microsoft has already integrated a chatbot in its Edge browser powered by OpenAI. Brave may not be able to integrate with OpenAI due to non-competes, but other options are available.
Building on the BAT ecosystem
The Basic Attention Token (BAT) is central to Brave's advertising model. By finding new uses for BAT — such as enabling e-commerce transactions or integrating with other platforms or services — Brave could boost its value proposition and appeal to users.
Competition
- Mozilla. Firefox is still in the game, pushing privacy as a key feature.
- Safari. Apple continues to improve its browser with additional privacy-preserving features.
