Google is often dismissively called an ad company.

Why is that? Because most of their revenue is from ads.

How does Brave make money? With ads.

Privacy-centric positioning makes sense to capture a part of the market. But the mis-aligned incentives are there for Brave just as much as they are for Google.

Are they better right now than Google? Probably. Is it smart to trust a company that only makes money with ads with control over your browsing experience in the medium term? Not so much.

It's quite amusing to me how well their marketing works.

What we need is a browser that can exist as a viable business without being chained to ad revenue.

I was about say, before the trolls responded, that I'm about 50/50 on it being that and it being that Eich hasn't stayed cancelled, that he's done well for himself despite that, which just infuriates a certain crowd here. But then they came and made that point for me. The pleasant surprise is how they are a minority even here. And in my recent years in the tech world, I discovered that half of my coworkers used Brave. They don't care what the vocal minority thinks, and neither do I. The Brave community grows anyway.

Brave hate is a meme because any time anyone wants to talk about anything internet, 100 accounts come out of the woodwork to tell us some Chromium wrapper is the second coming of Christ. The rest of us are sick of all the promotion and get chippy in response.

If you’ve been around long enough, you know they’re at least paying YouTubers to use and promote the browser without any disclosure. Who knows how far past that they are going.

I'm still skeptical how that could reasonably work on an opt-in basis.

Being annoyed daily by ads in exchange for some obscure crypto currency which might be worth something in the far future doesn't seem like a proposal to me that could convince a lot of people.

So I wonder, how many Brave users actually do opt-in? More than five?