Brave Software, which makes the eponymous browser and search engine, is taking the next step by opening a self-serve ad platform option.
The idea of contesting the Google and Chrome power-combo is daunting. The two would-be contenders, Apple and Safari or Microsoft’s Edge and Bing, each have a market cap of more than $2 trillion. But Brave, which was founded by Brendan Eich, a co-founder of Mozilla and Firefox, is giving it a go.
Brave’s ad business now counts about 800 total advertisers and “multiple millions per month in revenue,” said Luke Mulks, VP of business operations. Some napkin-back math has Brave Ads in the $25 million to $50 million annual range.
Where Brave ads go
Brave ad budgets can be channeled to sponsored news or other links when browser users open a new tab or use its news service. A sponsored push notification type placement and ads in the search feed are also available.
Brave also has a program that publishers can opt into to earn money from users. Brave has a crypto-based wallet system where users can hold Basic Attention Tokens, which can be bought or collected by viewing ads. Those tokens can be distributed to publishers or creators people follow (thus the publisher opt-in).
For now, Mulks said Brave hasn’t “crossed the threshold” into actual publisher page placements. He said the company expects to advertise on other site URLs at some point and publishers will get a “sizable rev share” when it does.
The growth game
Brave has a nice thing going, with an ad business in the tens of millions. But that’s hardly a drop in the bucket for a browser and search engine, which is expensive to build and grow.
The self-serve ad product Brave debuted this month has 30 to 40 advertisers, Mulks said, though the company hasn’t started its initial marketing push for the product.
A big benefit of the self-serve platform is that it will bring many new advertisers, not just shift managed serve buyers to self-serve, according to Mulks. Managed service buyers have a $10,000 advertising minimum, but a self-serve advertiser can get started for $1,000.
More SaaS-based businesses, like consumer privacy or security companies, are self-serve advertisers. Now, merchants with their own sophisticated marketing systems, including Amazon and Wayfair, have joined with the self-serve platform.
This offering and the search ads hav opened up “a whole new slew of advertisers” for the Brave business, Mulks said.
Brave’s new world
Adding new types and verticals of advertisers is important for Brave. Its strength early on was in crypto, where it’s a native player (Brave was a blockchain advocate before it started serving ads). The crypto startup and investment boom meant big marketing budgets that default platforms like Google and Facebook were often not amenable to.
Since the crypto crash, Brave must diversify its customer base.
Everything about the ad business “is a balancing act,” Mulks said. Search placements are lucrative and compelling but can easily overstep and reduce the value of the search engine, which is more important than any ad impression. Brave rode the waves of crypto and privacy tech budgets and must now navigate a transition to larger consumer brands and agencies.
Brave’s pitch to ad buyers right now is, firstly, to reach an addressable audience that cannot be found by the major web players, he said. But the platform is also a tool that “abstracts away a lot of the acronyms” of online advertising in favor of a full-funnel approach where one platform controls the audience and ad serving.
Brave’s ad platform playbook is familiar to the smaller mobile and web walled gardens, which sacrifice transparency (the flip side of preserving privacy) but have unique first-party data and media. They are also hard-pressed right now to prove they drive as much value.
“We know we’re not going to win by telling advertisers, ‘I can add every third-party vendor that you use,’” Mulks said. “But what we want to be able to do is prove if you put $1 in, here’s what you get out, to make it easy for them to go to their boss and defend themselves.”
