Privacy browser Brave reaches 8 million monthly active users

By Robert Stevens

Brave, the privacy-focused, crypto-powered browser, is starting to give browser giants Safari and Chrome, and advertising giants like Facebook and Google, a run for their money. A company blog post announced today that Brave had reached almost 8 million monthly active users, and delivers almost 400 “privacy-preserving” campaigns.

There are now over 290,000 Brave Verified Publishers who receive Basic Attention Tokens (BAT), the crypto tokens that Brave anonymously dishes out to people who watch adverts on the Brave browser. Those Verified Publishers include 200,000 YouTube creators, 33,000 website publishers or creators, 15,000 Twitch streamers, and 28,000 Twitter accounts.

The point of Brave, and BAT, is to overturn the advertising monopolies of companies like Facebook and Google, whom Brave reports taking 73 percent of all ad dollars. Brave also accuses “large media sites” of violating users’ privacy by hosting up to 70 trackers. 

Brave, by contrast, blocks malvertisements and trackers, instead using a blockchain system to pay users and publishers in BAT tokens. Users are rewarded in BAT for watching ads, while publishers receive BATs based on user attention, which is securely monitored by the Brave browser. The more people spend time looking at ads, the more revenues increase. Brave users can also opt out of watching ads entirely, and top up their BAT wallet to reward sites instead.

Brave reports that its campaigns are more successful than conventional advertising campaigns. Platform engagement is very high, with click-through rates of 14 percent, 12 percent of which were for ten seconds or longer, trouncing the industry average, which Brave puts at 2 percent. 

Brave also recently updated a dashboard interface, giving advertisers more information about advertising campaigns, including hourly updates and additional data visualizations.

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