I think some people might find it interesting to see the types of evil monetization offers browser makers receive. I assume that as Privacy Browser increases in popularity I will receive more of these. I don’t intend to post them all, but I will probably post one example of each type. Previously, I posted about an offer to monetize the default search engine, which many browsers do. This is an example of an offer to monetize affiliate links.
Hello,
My name is Yurii, I am a representative of the Takeads product
I drew attention to your Browser
Many global brands work with us, and we have an excellent offer for monetizing traffic of your browser. We have successfully implemented our solution into opera.com, start.fyi, etc.
MonetizeLink turns all direct links from the website into affiliate links and brings you revenue from clicks or sales. On the startpage of your browser there are bookmarks with recently visited websites. We can monetize these bookmarks. When a user clicks the bookmark and buys something, your browser will get a commission.
The conversion rate will be very high because we have more than 30,000 active advertisers around the world that can be monetized in our database.
Let me give you one example: our partner browser, which has +100,000 downloads on Google Play, earns 20K-40K euros per month MonetizeLink is a good tool for additional passive browser monetization. Passive – because after the integration of the tool, it will monetize the links on its own.
Please let me know if you are interested in my offer. I will prepare a presentation for you and arrange a joint call, where I will tell you everything in detail.
Beyond the bad grammar and punctuation, there are a couple of things that stand out to me from this email.
- I have no idea if Opera actually uses their service, but this is the type of nonsense I have come to expect from major browsers.
- Yurii has obviously never used Privacy Browser, because he says, “On the startpage of your browser there are bookmarks with recently visited websites”. Privacy Browser definitely doesn’t do that, and I am fundamentally opposed to ever implementing such a feature.
- I have no idea if the amount of money he is promising is realistic, but it gives some sense of how much browsers can make when they turn their users into the product.
Privacy Browser’s users are savvy enough that if I ever were to try to do some horrible thing like this someone would notice almost immediately. Also, I would imagine that F-Droid would refuse to build a copy of Privacy Browser that included such a monetization library, which would be a big red flag. But this goes back to the fact that when it comes to privacy on the internet, I’m not a “trust but verify” kind of guy. I am only a “verify” kind of guy.