[ad_1]
Investors and consumers are showing growing excitement for privacy-focused alternatives to Google and Facebook as the real cost of their “free” services is re-examined.
Yes but: It’s still tough to compete with the massive profit engines these companies have built.
Driving the news: A new privacy-oriented search engine, You come, enters public beta today and announces it has raised $ 20 million in funding, led by Marc Benioff with participation from Breyer Capital, Sound Ventures, Day One Ventures, and others.
- The company, which is led by former Salesforce chief scientist Richard Socher, wants to differentiate itself by providing not only standard web results, but also information from Twitter, Reddit and other services.
- Users can choose which sources they prefer or which they prefer not to see. The company has developed a number of early apps, but plans to open its service so that others can provide results for relevant inquiries.
- Socher said the goal is to provide the consumer with both privacy and freedom of action. “I think it’s something really important to our information diet as a society,” Socher told Axios.
In the meantime, ProtonMail, the end-to-end encrypted email service, expects 75 million users by the end of the year, up from 50 million in June, CEO Andy Yen told Axios. “It’s part of a bigger shift,” says Yen. “It’s no longer really about the products, but about the tech ecosystems themselves.”
The big picture: A growing number of startups are trying to build businesses with users who value their privacy and often focus on subscriptions rather than advertising – or using ads, but without the persistent tracking typical of their larger competitors.
- DuckDuckGo says it saw 55% Increase in downloads between June 2020 and June 2021.
- Brave, a privacy-conscious web browser says it now 36.2 million monthly active users, up from 18.3 million in August 2020.
- Preliminary search, approaching 3 million users is still small, but the success of larger privacy-centric search engines like DuckDuckGo bodes well for the upstart.
Be Smart: ProtonMail’s Yen attributes this year’s surge in usage to an increase in privacy threats and authoritarianism threatening journalists and activists around the world.
- He notes that users in countries outside of the US are “entering privacy a lot quicker … privacy is more real to people in many of these places”.
- “The western world has been a little slow to get a handle on that,” he added.
ProtonMail has been involved for a long time in efforts to advocate journalism around the world and has more recently plunged into competitive big tech battles.
- Yen says the success of ProtonMail shows that “you can have privacy as a profitable business model”.
The catch: The revenue models for many of these startups are either immature or non-existent, and even the most advanced are not keeping the money made by the web giants.
- Yen says “at least 95%” of ProtonMail users don’t pay for any services.
- You.com doesn’t even focus on sales when it launches, but instead tries to draw people to the site. It can eventually sell ads, but it promises not to hyper-target users beyond their search query and never to sell users’ data.
[ad_2]
