Brave, a Privacy-focused Web Browser, Attracts Techies

Brave is a niche web internet browser popular with tech enthusiasts for its privacy, advertisement blocking, and special crypto-currency-based advertising and benefits system.

Introduced in 2016, the Brave web browser works on Chromium, which is the very same quick, reliable, and stable web browser engine that runs Google’s Chrome. The Brave internet browser intends to be more effective and faster than popular web internet browsers while providing an extraordinary level of personal privacy. By some price quotes, Brave is as much as eight times faster than web browsers that enable tracking.

Although Brave is far from mainstream, it does provide opportunities for e-commerce merchants.

Extremely Niche

In October 2019, Brave’s parent business, Brave Software, revealed that the internet browser had passed 2.8 million daily active users and 8 million monthly active users.

A million is a large number. However, in terms of web internet browser users, it is small. Brave’s 2.8 million everyday active users would be a rounding error for Google Search, which gets more than 60,000 inquiries per 2nd or about 3.6 million search queries per minute.

But being niche is not always bad.

From the point of view of an e-commerce marketer, the folks who use the Brave web browser are most likely tech-savvy, worried deeply about their privacy, politically active, and upscale.

Feeling in one’s bones that Brave exists takes a higher degree of tech-awareness than utilizing Chrome, Microsoft Edge, or Apple Safari. And knowing that Brave exists won’t suffice for many individuals to switch. Therefore, the folks who choose to utilize Brave are most likely engineers, web developers, and other relatively high wage earners.

If your online shop sells socks or power tools, for example, Brave users are not likely appealing to potential customers. However, if you sell advanced software applications, computer systems, devices, and similar, the Brave audience could be worth marketing to.

Privacy-focused

You will not reach Brave users with certain types of online ads or nearly any type of retargeting. That’s because, in the words of journalist Matthew Hughes, “The Brave browser is defined by an unapologetically pathological concentrate on user personal privacy.”

First, Brave forces websites to use safe connections when possible, limiting some kinds of tracking and hacking.

Then, utilizing what it calls “guards,” the internet browser likewise obstructs trackers, tracking-related web cookies, and what the business calls “data collection parasites.”

Beyond this, the Brave internet browser does what it can to be relatively more hard to recognize users.

For example, many online marketers will use what is in some cases called “browser fingerprinting” to recognize returning visitors.

Websites know a visitor’s web browser, operating system, and many of the internet browser extensions. Collectively, this makes it is possible to determine someone without utilizing a cookie. If a buyer visited your site a lot of times and bought a product on the 10th session, your marketing team could, potentially, connect the dots and better understand the customer’s journey.

While this could be great for marketers, consumers don’t constantly like this sort of tracking. And Brave obscures a few of the info needed for browser fingerprinting, making it more difficult to recognize an individual.

Ad-blocking and smudged internet browser fingerprints, however, won’t stop sites from reaching Brave users.

First, Brave doesn’t obstruct first-party cookies. This implies that advertisements on a Google search engine result page will still appear when someone searches Google by means of the Brave internet browser.

This exact same holds true for DuckDuckGo, which is a privacy-focused search engine that displays non-tracking Microsoft (Bing) advertisements.

Therefore, paid search projects might still reach Brave users.

Brave Rewards

The Brave internet browser also has a special marketing and rewards model.

This model starts with Brave Rewards. Brave blocks certain types of advertisements. However numerous publishers depend upon ad revenue. So Brave came up with Brave Rewards to pay publishers for the attention Brave users provide.

A publisher can sign up with Brave. Then each time a Brave user checkouts that publisher’s website, the software application notices and anonymously records it. At the end of the month, those publishers get a proportional share of the user’s contribution. The contribution is conserved and paid in a crypto-currency called BAT– “basic attention token.”

Moreover, Brave will also pay users to view safe, non-prying ads.

Roughly 70 cents out of every dollar you invest in Brave marketing will go to the Brave user that views your advertisements.

Simply put, Brave is a privacy-focused web browser used by relatively few folks. It blocks tracking ads, however, it also offers a way for companies, such as e-commerce merchants, to reach consumers.