Brave browser seems to have figured out a way to make money on ads without sacrificing user data/privacy. If you opt in to their ads they basically sync ad campaigns to your browser and then use local browsing profiles that don't get sent to any servers to decide which ads to show you. It all happens on your computer and it doesn't send your profile to anybody, so the only user data involved is "user looked at an ad, but we have no idea who actually looked at it".

How do you know it is not sacrificing user data/privacy? It sends a lot of requests 'home' to their servers with your private information like IP address in them. At best you should be wary of that. If privacy is your concern you should look for a zero-telemetry browser, and even better if ads are not their primary business model.

It's REALLY easy to check what the browser is doing and multiple people have. There was an article floating around claiming it phones home but many people very quickly pointed out that the author was mistaken, at best (they thought some CSS or something completely normal being loaded in the background was brave "phoning home").

The question is not what the browser is doing (which is easily verifiable with a network proxy, even without the browser being open source), but the question is what the server is doing with the data that is being sent to it by the browser, and that data includes PII like the IP address.

The best way to remove this question is for browsers to be zero-telemetry which is what I was advocating for.

This is the problem. When ads are your primary revenue stream, you're up against facebook and google, who are both highly efficient at turning marketing dollars into conversions.

How would you complete with this? Why would anyone spend 10x on you to get the same conversions?

According to https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/you-com-523e they have received $20M in funding, so as long as they have a sensible burn rate, they could last for years before having to think about how to make a profit. Although the projects that don't have a plan at the outset always seem to either turn bad or fail.

To your point, this is why I would avoid them. Give me faith that I won't see you end up monetizing/selling user data or doing something dumb to your user base when that cash runs out. Otherwise I'm inherently not going to trust you.

The OP even admitted he hasn't given any thought to monetization, which almost certainly means that this is another dime-a-dozen startup with a built-in exit strategy. The fact that his primary value proposition is that You isn't Google, is a telltale sign that this is destined to join Color in the annals of startup failures.

Are you new to the whole startup thing? They aren't making money, they're just burning VC cash.