The privacy-focused web browser, Brave announced it has grown by over 130% over its first year of its stable version. Brave now boasts 20 million monthly users, this time last year, the browser had 8.7 million active monthly users.
Brave attributes the growth to increasing privacy concerns held by many people online. Brave is marketed as offering its users superior privacy to that of rival browsers. However, the privacy-focused web browser is not without controversy, In June, Brave was caught auto-completing certain URLs to append a referral id, and while the company called this a mistake, the source code told a more deliberate story.
Brave is built on Chromium, an opensource software code base that also powers Google’s Chrome and Microsoft’s Edge browsers. This allows most Chrome browser extensions to work on Brave removing some barrier to adoption.
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As of now Google Chrome still dominates the market with 69% of the browser share (innuendo irresistible), with browsers like Firefox, Brave, and Microsoft Edge slowly chipping away at Chrome’s share as they introduce new features or increased privacy.
Much of what is driving Brave’s growth is Apple’s change allowing browsers other than Safari to be the default option on iOS. Since this change Brave has seen its iOS user base increase about 33%.
One of Braves most touted features is that the browser blocks most ads by default, even showing users how much time blocking these ads has saved them on the browsers home screen. Brave also offers their own opt-in ad service that now has “2 billion ad confirmation events”. The company says they have completed 2,215 campaigns from over 460 companies, and claims a click-through rate of 9%, blowing away industry averages, and raising a few eyebrows.
On the ads frontier Brave has seen a 3.2x growth in verified sites taking part in their ‘creators’ program that allows publishers to earn a cryptocurrency called BAT (Basic Attention Token). These tokens are a form of tips from users who frequent sites in the program. The total number of verified creators grew from 300,000 to 972,000 over the last year.
Header: Screenshot from my browser
I’m Danial Payne I’ve been a freelance writer, video, and web person since 1988. My passion is technology, whether it’s the latest cameras or cutting edge ways the internet is used to improve medicine. I write for Internet News Flash and am helping with the online resurrection of Digital Content Creators Magazine Contact me: danielpaynetech@gmail.com