Vivaldi: What does the browser earn?

A browser may have several sources of income. Someone uses user data for advertising targeting, someone earns on promoting affiliate content, someone lives at the expense of third-party investments and donations. The company Vivaldi Technologies told about where they are taking money for the further development of the browser. Under the cut - translation of this article.

Vivaldi Browser Business Model

Many IT companies (including browser developers) make money by collecting and analyzing user data. To believe that today some service could survive, completely abandoning the "trade" of information about its users, is quite difficult.

However, Vivadli does not track user behavior or compile detailed profiles of their interests. Vivaldi does not collect data at all about the activity of browser users when working on a network. In fact, we are convinced that excessive collection of redundant data is harmful and even dangerous. The only data we have is information about the number of active users, their OS and approximate location.
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We created a browser, but how you use it, your interests, income, hobbies and work is not our business. And since you indirectly trust us with this information, we must do everything to protect your data .

We like to make a browser, and we are proud of our work. But we really need money ... Like any other company, we have to pay bills, but we have chosen a more ethical way of making money.

So, let's see what Vivaldi is making ...

Search engines

One of the main sources of income for the company is partnership with search engines. Every time you search for something using one of the pre-installed search engines, you help us develop our browser. We are currently working with DuckDuckGo, Quant, Ecosia, StartPage, Yahoo, Bing and Yandex.

The only exception was Google: we do not have contracts with a search engine, but we understand that many use it daily. Therefore, we still added Google to the list of pre-installed search engines. By the way, if you are looking at alternative search engines, you may be useful to one of our previous notes .

Affiliate links

The second source of income browser - affiliate links. When you launch the browser for the first time, you will notice that there are already some links in it: for example, Booking , eBay , Kayak , Start.me , Amazon , AliExpress , Tripadvisor or Airbnb . Every time you open a website using our link or make a purchase on one of our partner online services, we get income. Thus, simply using the sites to which you are most likely, and so used, you help us in working on our browser.

However, you are free to delete the preset bookmarks or replace them with direct links. But we would like you to keep the links until you understand whether you need them or not.

From time to time we can add links “for free”: for example, if it seems to us that some site may be useful to our users. And if, after reading this text, you have an overwhelming desire to return once deleted affiliate links, you can simply copy them and add them manually.

Vivaldi Mail and other services

Vivaldi serves as the basis for creating a large user community, and, thanks to the income from affiliate links and search engines, we can not only develop our browser, but also provide our users with a number of additional free services and services. For example, email service and blogging platform.

Together with the Vivaldi account, you receive both vivaldi .net e-mail (servers located in Iceland) and a blogging site. There are no ads in our services, and they could well replace your familiar solutions from other, larger and more popular companies. We do not earn and do not plan to earn on blogs and postal service. We are confident that for further development will be enough of the money that brings us the browser.

Want to support the browser? Nothing is easier! You simply use a browser, work with familiar sites and search engines, but it is precisely because of this that Vivaldi exists. Tell your friends about us. The more people know about us, the more users we can attract, the more resources we can allocate to accelerate the development of the browser.

Original article
Translation: Alex Semnov-Sherin
Adjustment: Shpankov