Brave passes 15 million monthly active users

Brave was founded by Brendan Eich and Brian Bondy, a reputed duo in the web industry. Eich is the creator of the JavaScript programming language and also a co-founder of the Mozilla project, the Mozilla Foundation, and the Mozilla Corporation. He served as the CTO and briefly as the CEO of the Mozilla Corporation. He is currently the CEO of Brave.

Bondy is an experienced software engineer, who was previously at Khan Acadamy and Mozilla. Bondy was also a co-founder of VisionWorks Solutions, developers of Robobak, an online data storage provider. Robobak was acquired in 2011 by KineticD for an undisclosed amount. Bondy is currently the CTO of Brave.

The duo founded Brave in 2015 and have since raised over US$7M in venture capital funding from the likes of the Digital Currency Group, Pantera Capital, Abstract Ventures, Founders Fund and Foundation Capital.

CEO of Pantera Capital, Dan Morehead stated, “Pantera is proud to be an investor in Brave and the revolution of the browser space. We believe that one of the killer uses of blockchain technology is micropayments, and Brave will use the technology to bring an enhanced experience and model for content monetization.”

The vision for the Brave Browser is to improve the web by giving users a safer, faster, and better browsing experience while growing support for content creators through a new attention-based ecosystem of rewards.

To this end, Brave created a token called The Basic Attention Token or BAT, and conducted a token offering in the middle of the ICO boom in 2017. Brave sold one billion BAT and successfully raised just over US$35M or 156,250 ETH. Brave communicated at the time that the proceeds of the ICO will be used to develop an advertising platform.

The Brave Browser replaces ads on a website. The user can then receive 70% of the ad revenue as a reward for their attention, payable in BAT. Users can also auto-contribute the funds to publishers using settings in the browser.

After five years of operations, the company recently stated that it has surpassed 15 million monthly active users and 5 million daily active users.

Source: Brave

The browsers unique product, Brave Ads was launched last year in April. The product has since facilitated 1530 ad campaigns. Recent campaigns included brands such as Verizon, Newegg, Chipotle, and PayPal/Honey, in addition to earlier campaigns by Amazon, Harry’s Razors, Intel, CBS, KIND snacks, Logitech, Lenovo, Grubhub, Belkin, Quickbooks, and Evernote.

The average industry click-through rate (CTR) for ads is 2% while the 90-day platform average CTR for Brave Ads is 9%, according to a blog post by Brave, with some brands reporting CTRs of up to 15%.

As mentioned earlier, an added feature of the Brave browser is the users can make contributions to their favorite content creators. This side of the Brave business has also grown significantly as there are now 700,000 Brave Verified content creators on platforms such as YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, Web sites, Vimeo, and GitHub.

In the last week of May, Brave also announced that they are trialing private and unlimited video calling. This feature it currently only available on Brave Nightly, their testing and development version, for users in the U.S.

The newly launched encrypted video service, called Brave Together, can be used to make unlimited video calls. These calls are end-to-end encrypted, although they are currently limited to two participants.

Brave claimed that they are using existing open-source technology created by Jitsi. Jitsi is a set of open-source projects that allows users to easily build and deploy secure video conferencing solutions. The technology has surpassed 10 million monthly average users and is owned by 8×8, a provider of cloud-based unified communications for enterprise.

The launch of Brave Together is timely as the COVID-19 pandemic has led to an exponential increase in the use of video conferencing programs. The major player in this space that has seen the largest increase in users is Zoom, which has been criticized for its privacy and security.

After facing rapid growth which led revelations of the lack of privacy and security on the Zoom platform, Zoom decided to focus on this and acquired Keybase in early May in a step to introduce end-to-end encryption.

As Brave New Coin reported, Zoom’s acquisition of Keybase was an efficient way to quickly added a team of security-focused developers to the platform. Max Krohn, a founder of Keybase is now leading Zoom’s security engineering team.