Many of you will be too young to remember this, but popular web browsing software actually
used to cost money. In fact, it wasn't until 1998 that Netscape Navigator became free to use for regular consumers.
But almost no one pays for web browsers anymore, so why are the companies that developed them
giving them out for nothing? Do they just hate money? Ha, of course not.
Web browsers are actually monetized quite heavily and do make money.
It's just that it's not always obvious to an end user how that happens.
So let's take a look at how some of the popular browsers keep themselves afloat, starting
with the biggest one of them all, Google Chrome. It turns out that development of the world's most popular web browser is easily supported
by the things that it merely encourages its users to do.
For example, Chrome's search feature automatically uses Google as your search engine, which invariably
will serve you the ads that make up a huge part of Google's revenue.
Oh, and by the way, this is very similar to how Microsoft's Edge browser makes money as well,
only by directing people to Microsoft's Bing search engine and its advertisements instead.
And then, once you click off of Google's search page, many of the ads that you see
throughout the web are also hosted by Google.
So the idea is that it makes sense for Google to build and maintain a browser that gets
people on the web and just browsing, which will lead them to look at Google's ads.
It also doesn't hurt that Chrome steers users towards using Google's own suite of apps,
such as Gmail, Google Drive, and Google Maps, some of which are ad-supported, while others
offer paid versions for extra functionality such as more storage space.
But did you know that Google actually pays to prop up competing web browsers?
How does that make any sense? Well, just as Google aims to use Chrome to direct users to its services, it also tries
to get other browsers to do the same thing.
Mozilla Firefox is a great example of this. Google has made multiple deals with Mozilla over the years to make Google Firefox's default
search engine in certain markets. Other search engines, such as Yandex and Baidu, have also contributed large amounts of money
to Mozilla's coffers, which has become quite important for Firefox's survival as its usage
share has been declining for a number of years. Although Mozilla still operates as a non-profit and does still receive contributions from
folks who just feel like donating, the vast majority of its income now comes from search
engine royalties. Similarly, Apple's Safari gets quite hefty royalties from Google, even more than Firefox.
While Firefox got a little over half a billion dollars in royalties in 2017, Google made
a deal to pay Apple $12 billion in 2019 to make sure that Google would stay Safari's
default search service. And although it seems strange since Google and Apple compete directly in other areas
such as in smartphones, Google apparently makes way more than its payments to Apple on
the increased ad revenue that it gets back. To take things in a slightly different direction, let's have a quick look at the Brave browser
known for its focus on user privacy. Well, the way they do it is a bit unique in that it's based around a cryptocurrency
called the Basic Attention Token, or BAT.
Users can opt in to a rewards program that will pay them in BAT for viewing ads with
70% of the revenue going to users and the other 30% going to the developers of Brave.
We'd be remiss too if we didn't also mention Opera, a browser that still has a substantial
cult following. In addition to the aforementioned search engine royalties, they also have deals with sites
like eBay to get placed on a user's main speed dial page and have partnered with smartphone
manufacturers like Xiaomi to pre-install the browser on their devices.
And then there was also a recent scandal where it appeared that Opera was using apps in certain
countries to offer predatory loans with absurdly high interest rates.
So the bad news is they've used up a fair bit of their goodwill and they may not be
a popular browser for much longer. So the good news is that they're gaining valuable experience in the industry of loan sharking,
so they could always survive by offering student loans, since that seems to be basically how
that works. Thanks for watching guys! Like, dislike, check out our other videos, leave a comment if you have a suggestion for
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