According to Des Martin, head of marketing at the company, crypto-friendly Brave is now the top-rated browser on the Google Play Store. As its own Chrome browser trails behind in terms of reviews from users, the revelation could prove humiliating for Google.
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| Brave is beating out Chrome with Crypto rewards baked into its DNA. |
Google Play figures show that, after earning more than 238,000 ratings, Brave has an overall rating of 4.8 stars. As a method that blocks data-grabbing advertisements and trackers, the browser sees itself, ensuring pages load quicker and battery life is maintained.
Instead, it is designed around a digital blockchain-based advertisement network named Brave Rewards, which rewards users if they opt in to see ads with the Simple Attention Token (BAT) cryptocurrency. The organization claims that 70% of the income is shared with participants in this program.
BAT is one of the world's top 50 crypto-currencies with a market cap of $330 million, according to CoinMarketCap. The blockchain-friendly approach of the browser has also made it a popular destination for crypto-exchange ad campaigns.
Embarrassing for Google?
For Google, Brave's rave reviews might be a little humiliating. The Chrome browser ranks even less favorably in its own app store, with a ranking of just 4.1 stars. That's despite the fact that it is the most popular browser in the world, with a 65 percent market share.
At the time of writing, Firefox (which has a market share of just 4 percent) has a rating of 3.9, while Microsoft Edge (2.6 percent market share) has a 4.5 rating.
Martin wrote, sharing the figures with his followers: "Time to make the switch"This does not seem to be translating into widespread use, despite the excitement for the Brave browser among Google Play reviewers.
Its market share is not high enough to list by name, according to StatCounter ... even though Internet Explorer is.
The monthly active users have now reached 19 million, according to Brave. While those levels of growth are impressive, compared to the billions that use Google Chrome, it pales. (The firm reported last June that Chrome for Android had notched up five billion installs.)
Does Brave ad up?
Last month, Brave revealed that the BAT-earning ad campaigns run through its browser have an average click-through rate of 9%,"well above the industry average of just 2%".
The company said at the time that more than 2,000 promotions, including mainstream brands such as Amazon, Verizon, Logitech, and Lenovo, had been introduced.
For users and advertisers alike, it seems like opt-in advertising are shaping up to be a win-win, particularly with cryptocurrency rewards adding an attraction. The question now is whether this achievement will scale to a larger user base upwards.
A Brave confrontation
Brave has taken it upon himself to hold Google to a higher standard, despite being in a David and Goliath fight. The company lodged a formal lawsuit against the tech giant in the European Union back in March and accused it of violating the data protection regulations of the GDPR.
Brave accused Google of engaging in "internal data free-for all" by writing to European competition regulators, which means that personal information is used across its entire business rather than for a specific purpose.
But Brave has also experienced its fair share of controversies, as reported by Modern Consensus. In June, it emerged that the company automatically added affiliate links to its users' regularly visited crypto websites and pocketed profits as a result.
When asked by Modern Consensus if, considering its fierce criticism of other browsers, the incident harmed Brave 's reputation, CEO Brendan Eich said: "We do not see this as anything akin to what we criticize Google for."
