[jkldotio]

DDG has done excellent work building their traffic[0] and have been getting a solid 10-12 million or so searches per day for a while. Even if you halve that due to !bang redirects and ad blocking and put a fairly low CPM on the ads they have quite a few millions or or low tens of millions coming in. I haven't been following too closely but my impression is Gabriel has been increasing staffing and other costs at a rate far lower than the increasing revenue.

Additionally the donation itself got a vast amount of coverage in the relevant communities, including HN, so the expenditure is offset against advertising for user acquisition they didn't need to do. It probably also strengthened their core community, making their users more sticky. The donation also went to some of the infrastructure they use anyway.

[0]https://duckduckgo.com/traffic.html

[doomslay]

Not to pour water on things, but after 8 years or so I'm not sure it's growing that well...

After 6 years, Google was doing 200m searches a day.

Google now does something like 4 billion a day. So duckduckgo, after 8 years of growth, has captured about 0.3% of the search market. At that sort of rate, it'll take decades to get any meaningful share, and that's assuming Google stand still, which they won't.

[ownagefool]

That's assuming you have to own the market. You don't, you just need more income than outcome. It would appear DDG is achieving that. Good for them I say.

[kriro]

That's not a bad share of the market. Their strategy is fairly smart/standard chasm crossing. Capture programmers/tech oriented users first. As long as they have solid growth in that department I wouldn't worry.

[ae_keji]

But Google also more or less owns the market now. Back then it was anyone's game (and internet usage in tdeveloped countries was growing rapidly, making the market a bit more volatile).

[Gaelan]

Not just ad-blocking; they have a "disable ads" option in their settings.