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 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 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 dollars 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 although 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 percent 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 although 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 speaking of how that works
brilliant is the problem solving based website and app with a hands-on approach
to learning how stuff works they've got over 60 interactive courses in math
science and computer science the great thing about brilliant is you get to
master concepts by solving fun challenging problems for yourself rather
than watching someone else do it it's really useful if you're in a stem course
their courses have storytelling code writing interactive challenges and
problems to solve and you can check out their course on search engines have you
ever wondered how google can answer your question in just a fraction of a second
even though there are billions of websites for it to search through check
it out because the first 200 people who had to brilliant.org techwiki we're
gonna have that linked below are gonna get 20 off their annual premium
subscription thanks for watching guys like dislike check out our other videos
leave a comment if you have a suggestion for a future fastest possible and don't
forget to subscribe because if you do chipmunks will bite your toes
i've seen them do it oh