Brave Browser Goes from 3 Million to 4 Million Monthly Active Users in Just 2 Months

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The Brave browser is picking up momentum with leaps and bounds, growing from 3 million monthly active users (MAU) in July to 4 million at the time of writing.

Latest @Brave stats: 4M users (MAU), 21K verified channels, 26K publisher accounts. We will step on gas w/ brave-core + BAT on mobile this fall, get past 5M easily by EOY, >= 12M next, adding BAT ad deals to token grants, making good on the promise of @attentiontoken economics. — BrendanEich (@BrendanEich) September 2, 2018

Brave, originally conceived by 2 former Mozilla engineers, is experiencing a great acceleration in growth. Brave was at 1.4 million MAU in February. By July, they hit 3 million—meaning growth averaged about 300,000 MAU per month. Their growth boosted even further between July and August, increasing to nearly 500,000 new users per month.

So far, the Brave browser has had 10 million downloads, which means around 40% of the people who download it become regular users.

Reasons for Brave’s Increasing Popularity

This growth is driven by a number of factors—among them are increasingly annoying and invasive spyware and browser advertisements. The Brave browser features highly effective built-in ad and tracker blocking, which has been called controversial by some established figures in web development.

Privacy is also another major concern that Brave addresses. The browser integrates support for TOR and automatically uses DuckDuckGo in incognito tabs, a search engine which stores no records of user searches.

BAT Tokenomics

Possibly the biggest driver behind Brave’s growth is the fact that it is riding the cryptocurrency wave with a high potential tokenomics model.

Users can choose to see ads if they wish, and in exchange receive a share of revenue generated in the form of the Basic Attention Token (BAT). The Brave browser features a built-in BAT wallet. The program began testing in June.

This makes a strong case for future demand (and thus value) for the token, since advertisers will need to purchase BAT in order to run ads, much in the same way that companies currently pay Google’s AdSense.

In addition to this, Brave has already integrated tipping for content providers, with at least 14,500 YouTubers and 4,500 websites signed up so far.

Brave Faces Stiff Competition

Brave is certainly not the only browser serving the cryptocurrency market—Opera recently released a browser with a built-in cryptocurrency wallet.

Since Brave CEO Brendan Eich was formerly a Firefox executive, it’s understandable he would want to try another direction. Firefox has steadily been losing market share to Google Chrome for the past several years.

Trying to grab some of Google’s market share is no easy task. The tech giant’s browser currently boasts over a billion users.

Brave is taking a clever approach to this problem, however. They’ve designed the upcoming version 1.0 of the browser to be compatible with Chrome plugins, meaning extensions built for Chrome will also work with Brave. This allows Brave to upgrade their user experience to match Chrome, thus benefiting from Google’s dominant position.

It remains to be seen if Brave can actually be a credible challenger to Chrome, but if their present growth rates continue, it looks to be a top contender — or at the very least, a welcome alternative.

The Brave browser is available for Linux, Windows, Mac OS X, as well as for iPhone and Android, and can be downloaded here.

Related: Should You Invest in BAT? (Opinion)

Download the Brave Browser.