Brave diversifies revenue beyond BAT

The key point is that Brave was already learning how to make more money from each user, instead of depending only on adding more users. Revenue kept rising even as the 2022 crypto slump cooled the BAT economy, because Brave had already built a browser ad system with fixed revenue shares, added search as a new product in 2021, and later expanded into subscriptions and API products that monetize engagement more directly.

• Brave’s original money engine is not a normal browser ad business. Users opt into Brave Ads, advertisers can buy campaigns in BAT or USD, users receive 70% of user ad revenue, and Brave keeps 30%. That means revenue can grow from better ad load, pricing, and advertiser demand even if MAU growth slows.
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• The flattening in 2022 lines up with crypto exposure. Brave ties rewards and creator payouts to BAT, and the company itself flags dependence on crypto adoption as a core risk. At the same time, Brave still moved from about 50M MAUs at the end of 2021 to 67.2M in 2023, so the issue was decelerating growth, not user contraction.
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• What changed structurally is that Brave stopped being only a browser with token rewards. Brave Search launched in 2021, became the default for some new browser downloads in October 2021, and later became fully independent of Bing. That gave Brave another surface for ads, queries, and eventually paid API usage.
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Going forward, Brave looks less like a crypto linked browser experiment and more like a privacy distribution layer with several revenue streams on top. As search, premium products, and developer APIs become a larger share of sales, revenue should track depth of usage across the product stack more than raw browser MAU alone.