Brave Search now has ads. Here’s all the reactions from the Brave community – spoiler alert: none of them of positive…
Brave is a privacy browser and search engine (like DuckDuckGo). Up to now, Brave has avoided ads – preferring to focus on BAT. But ads are coming to Brave, as confirmed by the company in a recent press release.
Here’s the full statement:
After nearly 18 months of testing and feedback from initial partners, Brave Search Ads have exited their beta phase and are now available in major markets as part of Brave’s innovative privacy-preserving ad platform. Leading brands such as Amazon Ads Sponsored Products, Dell, Fubo, Insurify, Shutterstock, and Thumbtack are using Brave Search Ads as part of their performance marketing strategies.
As of April 2024, a third of the top search advertisers in the US by media spend are either currently testing or have moved to paid Brave Search Ads campaigns. Since the beginning of the year, 89% of customers who started Brave Search Ads campaigns have continued to advertise in consecutive months.
Brave Search is available globally to all desktop and mobile users at search.brave.com, and is also the default search engine in the Brave browser, which has over 65 million monthly active users. It’s the fastest growing search engine since Bing, with over 10 billion annual queries
PRESS RELEASE
Brave Users React To Brave’s Introduction of “Privacy-First Ads”
Obviously, people that use Brave use it because they don’t want to be tracked and marketed to by Google / Microsoft / Apple and their respective advertising partners.
Brave has always been different. Initially, it set out to rewrite the publishing playbook through the implementation of its Basic Attention Token (BAT) blockchain, whereby readers and content creators could earn BAT for engagement inside Brave.
As of 2024, I have quite a lot of BAT but sadly it is not worth anything. I think BAT is sticking around but Brave now needs a more reliable, bankable form of income – and this is where Brave Ads come into play.
People are really, understandable irked by Brave’s decision to bring ads to its search engine. I spent a while cruising the social media landscape, gaging opinion and reactions – nearly all of them were negative.
Here’s some highlights via Reddit and Twitter:
Every single business is turning to ads. Apple, Brave, Netflix, even windows trying to upsell inside the start menu or in the explorer. I don’t know why the word that this is acceptable is going around. It’s fucked up.”
Time to drop it. If I’m doing a search, I am not asking for ads. Anything which deliberately injects unwanted information into results cannot be relied on or trusted.
We block other ads but we give you ads instead. Just trust us. I wonder the legality of injecting your own ads in place of others. I have a good feeling that will come next.
The amount of mental effort people commit themselves to in order to justify not using FF is astonishing.
Brave is nothing more than even more Chromium garbage.
There is no such thing as privacy preserving ads; you’re still selling your customers. And in order to fully respect privacy you’re going to end up with ineffective advertising, which makes very little profit.
If a company is giving you a product for free its because you are the product
So… Brave Search is now coming out and admitting that they’re a digital advertising company. Only one that, through their browser, knows every site you’re visiting, every internet search that you do, every bookmark that you save. It’s good of them to confess openly what many skeptics could only speculate about.
Bottom Line? This is a PR Disaster For The Company
Users are angry and feel betrayed by Brave’s decision to show ads in search results. It contradicts Brave’s claims of being privacy-focused and putting users first.
The idea of “privacy-preserving ads” is met with strong skepticism. Redditors argue that private ads that don’t track users won’t be effective for advertisers. One highly upvoted comment declares “There is no such thing as privacy preserving ads; you’re still selling your customers.”
Some call Brave hypocritical and greedy, accusing them of exploiting user data for profit just like the tech giants they criticize. Brave’s past issues, like injecting affiliate links, are mentioned as further evidence of questionable practices.
A small group of commenters acknowledge Brave’s need to make money to support its operations. They consider it the “best case scenario” if Brave needs funds to build an independent search index. A few state they’d be willing to pay for ad-free search.
Many comments compare Brave to other companies introducing more ads, like Apple, Netflix, and Microsoft. Some recommend switching to alternatives like Firefox. Brave’s use of Chromium is also criticized as not being genuinely private.
