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by MrAlex94 1059 days ago
If I'm not mistaken Arc is also a closed source browser. The company has raised $18M since 2020. How are they expecting to make that RoI for their investors?

Monetisation for browsers is incredibly hard, and doing it in a way that respects the end user is even harder. Curious to see their play.
3 comments
toyg 1059 days ago
The way some people can raise tens of millions on absolute vaporware, in 2023, continues to astonish me.
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basisword 1058 days ago
It’s a fully functioning publicly released product. That’s the opposite of vaporware.
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toyg 1058 days ago
They started raising in 2020 for a browser, a no-hope project in a commoditized consumer market dominated by giants with strong network effects. The software might not be vapor but the money will definitely be.
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fragmede 1057 days ago
Opera Browser had revenues of $87mm last quarter. You and I might get buy with Chrome for free, but it's not zero hope.

https://investor.opera.com/news-releases/news-release-detail...

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asadotzler 1058 days ago
It's not hard. Put a search box or three in the browser and make google and bing money. If you get users, you get money, it's that simple. Arc's problem isn't a business model, it's a user base. Firefox makes half a billion dollars a year in search revenue and a browser 1/10th that size could pay off $18M in debt in a few months.
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MrAlex94 1058 days ago
I’m aware; I’ve been in the industry a long time.

They won’t be making anywhere near 1/10th of what Firefox makes, even with 1/10th of the user base, because those are highly specialised contracts.

Google typically won’t touch you at all (although the founders connections may help them here, but I could see that upsetting some of Google’s business partners). Almost every Google search partnership is a legacy one.

With Bing, you’re looking at a standard revenue share, of which they take a cut, and you’re at the whim of seasonality, not a fixed sum as say Firefox has. Then, the investors won’t just want their investment back; they’ll want a proper return as well.

Like I’ve said, the monetization opportunities that respect the user are hard.

Avast made a killing with their browser, and they did that by selling user data.

The fact that they’re a closed source browser does not lend them any favours.

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maaatwo 1058 days ago
They're looking at PaaS-style monetization to start[1]: free for solo users, but teams looking to use Arc's collaborative features—none of which I think have been formally announced yet—will have to pony up.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eVda3zFLlhc

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