Brave Now Has Over 50 Million Users

Brave announced today that its flagship web browser surpassed over 50 million monthly active users by the end of 2021, hitting its publicly stated usage goal.

“Passing 50 million users is a tremendous milestone for our company,” Brave CEO and co-founder Brenden Eich said. “It is also a powerful confirmation of the global movement underway led by users seeking alternatives to the surveillance economy. “We’ve spent a successful year expanding our product range and our ecosystem, engaging with partners who share our vision for a Web free from Big Tech’s shackles. We have seen an incredible response among our users, creators, and community. We aim to double this growth again in 2022 and engage with even more users who seek a privacy-conscious way to browse the Web that rewards them instead of punishes them with tracking, and helps them directly support creators.”

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Brave made several major updates over the past year that contributed to this growth, including the launches of Brave Search (the first search/browser alternative to Big Tech that’s built on top of an independent index), Brave Talk (a privacy-preserving video conferencing solution), and many moves to deepen its ties with crypto (incl. Brave Wallet, partnerships with Solana and Gemini, and more), a Brave representative told me.

The firm also provided the following key stats from 2021:

– 2.3 billion queries annualized on Brave Search. This went from 0 to 190 million queries a month in less than 6 months, from public access in late June to December 2021.

– 1.3 million Verified Creators, up 30 percent this year across YouTube, Twitter, Twitch, and more.

– Brave’s ad platform has greatly expanded as revenue has grown 4x over the past 12 months. Brave Ads campaigns were supported in nearly 200 countries with over 7.5 billion ad confirmation events to date.

– Over 8 million users are now earning BAT via Brave Rewards.

– The most mobile growth of any browser in 2021 with over 10M downloads.

You can learn more from the Brave website.

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Conversation 11 comments

  • cmucodemonkey

    05 January, 2022 - 3:19 pm

    <p>I tried Brave for a while and overall I liked it, but I ran into a few things that I didn’t like. The biggest item was certain pages I need for work wouldn’t render in Brave, particularly relating to the MFA that my employer uses. I also had issues getting my bookmarks to sync properly. Some bookmarks never synced from device to device and a few times I had duplicate bookmarks for the same website.</p><p><br></p><p>Due to the MFA issue I ended up going back to Chrome, but I would consider trying Brave again in the future.</p>

  • wbhite

    Premium Member
    05 January, 2022 - 3:22 pm

    <p>I’ve been using Brave with DuckDuckGo for about a year now for most of my browsing/needs and it’s a perfectly fine setup (it’s Chromium, after all). I don’t sign into any Google services with it but I keep Chrome installed solely for those needs. I definitely recommend Brave.</p>

    • cmucodemonkey

      05 January, 2022 - 3:30 pm

      <p>DuckDuckGo is great! I’ve move all my computer and mobile browsers to use it and haven’t ever felt the need to go back to Google.</p>

      • dftf

        07 January, 2022 - 3:54 pm

        <p>If you like the Brave browser, why not also try their own search-engine: search.brave.com</p>

    • dftf

      07 January, 2022 - 3:54 pm

      <p>Instead of DuckDuckGo, why not try Brave’s own search-engine… search.brave.com ?</p>

  • SaintKaze

    05 January, 2022 - 8:56 pm

    <p>I have Brave installed on 2 phones and 5 pc and 2 vms. So not sure that number is 100% correct. As long as i keep getting that BAT i don’t care . lol </p>

    • ralfred

      Premium Member
      06 January, 2022 - 8:29 am

      <p>I tried Brave for a few weeks and never got any BAT. I saw some ads for crypto exchanges, but nothing else. What kind of ads do you see?</p>

      • SaintKaze

        08 January, 2022 - 3:13 am

        <p>mostly just cryptocurrency sites and banking. </p>

  • Donte

    06 January, 2022 - 10:55 am

    <p>Like Vivaldi, I have tried Brave at least 3 times. Both are just weird for me.</p>

    • dftf

      07 January, 2022 - 3:57 pm

      <p><em>Brave </em>certainly has the more "normal" UI, compared to <em>Vivaldi</em>, assuming we’re talking about the desktop versions (i.e. the ones that run on <em>Windows, macOS </em>or <em>Linux</em>).</p><p><br></p><p>On a smartphone device though, there’s not a huge UI difference then, so I can flip between the two. I prefer the way <em>Opera </em>on phones presents your bookmarks though — like a home-screen. Both <em>Brave </em>and <em>Vivaldi </em>do offer ways to show them in that style, but both don’t do it as well.</p>

  • txag

    06 January, 2022 - 10:14 pm

    <p>I like Brave, Plus I like supporting Brendan Eich, who was treated so badly by Mozilla.</p>

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