Do you notice that sometimes your information about your searches gets to other sources? You might be surfing through a site and a pop-up appears telling you about a product you have searched for before, that seems surprising to you. This happens because your information has been sold to these sites.
Google and some other browsing sites invade your privacy and sell your information. This is where Duckduckgo comes in; with duckduckgo your privacy is safe. Duckduckgo avoids invading your privacy and selling out your information but how does duckduckgo make money even while doing this?
In this article, I will guide you through everything you should know about Duckduckgo, how it works and how it makes money. You’ll also get to know the advantages and disadvantages of using Duckduckgo. Read along.
What Is DuckDuckGo?
Duckduckgo is a search engine like Google but unlike Google, your search history and information are safe here. To use this browser form, simply go to Duckduckgo and enter your search query to see how amazing this site works.
With Duckduckgo, you search for anything you want to find. It’s just like Google where you get to do your searches. The only difference is that with Duckduckgo your information is safe.
Since Duckduckgo doesn’t record or keep track of your search history or any passwords, you should be safe on the platform. They also don’t have any information as regards privacy. Due to this, they have no targeted ads on their website.
Duckduckgo gets its content from other websites like Bing but not Google; with these contents, they can provide specific search results to the users.
Also, Duckduckgo is associated with some other third-party platforms like Wikipedia or Apple’s Maps, they also have mobile apps users can make use of. To get the Duckduckgo mobile browser app, users can go to duckduckgo browser, search and download the app.
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Is Duckduckgo Profitable?
Even though Duckduckgo doesn’t sell its user’s browser history or invade their privacy, it has been profitable since 2014 and has made about $100 million in last year’s revenue!
With duckduckgo, you will figure out that making a profit from search engine land is possible and can be done comfortably. Also, you don’t need to sell your users’ search history to make that profit.
According to research, Duckduckgo made its $100 million even with less market share. It has become a bigger platform for users and gained greater market share than other sites like Bing, although no big corporation supports it. It is considered second to Google in terms of U.S. market share in mobile.
Its search traffic has increased to over 55% over the last few years and currently, duckduckgo has an estimated user value of 70 to 100 million.
Does Duckduckgo Sell Your Data?
When it comes to privacy, we are always concerned because we want our own private space and don’t want invasion. For instance, emails are considered a top private space, and we won’t want the invasion of these spaces.
Some websites don’t care about your privacy; they can easily and quickly sell out these spaces to big tech companies or organizations that need such information. These companies use this information to market their product and services to customers all around.
Due to this, many people have developed concerns around:
- Selling of their data
- Personal privacy invasion
- Breaching of data and hacking
- Misuse of their private credentials and information
Because of these concerns of the users, Duckduckgo emerged with a new policy where it doesn’t care about the user’s information.
With this, the users’ privacies are safe and they can utilize the browser to its full potential without having to worry about their privacy being invaded.
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Advantages of Using Duckduckgo
- It provides users with a privacy-focused environment where their IP address or information is secured but not stored or saved elsewhere.
- It can be integrated into chrome and used as an extension or directly via the duckduckgo website.
- Doesn’t display personalized ads or search results; thereby giving a different search experience.
Disadvantages of Using Duckduckgo
- Like most sites, duckduckgo still relies on advertising to get its revenue. The adverts appears in your searches but are not personalized to you.
- Duckduckgo offers no protection for viruses, ransomware, malware or other dangers of the internet.
How Does Duckduckgo Make Money?
Duckduckgo makes its income by keyword advertising, affiliate commissions, and charging licensing fees for its tracker radar tool.
The company is focused mainly on being privacy-oriented. In this aspect, they consider privacy first before any other thing. This differentiates duckduckgo from every other browser that uses its users’ private data to generate revenue.
With this policy, duckduckgo offers users a privacy-focused search engine and a more reliable browser. Using the browser, the company can build valuable rails.
Also, Duckduckgo has its search engine as the default option, the search engine acts as a quasi-marketing channel for those new to using the site.
The bowser of duckduckgo could also be monetized, for instance, by offering privacy-focused software products. Below are some of the various ways Duckduckgo makes income:
Advertising of keywords:
Duckduckgo generates its revenues mainly from keyword advertising. Here, advertisement is done regarding an auction system, and advertisers bid on the right to take the top spot on certain searches or queries.
After the auction, the adverts appear on the top or on any position in the search result. The listings consisting of ads are then marked as an ad. Every time a user clicks on these adverts, duckduckgo earns money.
Most advertisers try to keep their money in check by committing a limited budget for each keyword they won bids on. Duckduckgo uses these keywords to make money by using them as relevant ads instead of targeted ads.
Affiliate Commission
Duckduckgo receives a commission when they become affiliate marketers for some brands, sites, or products. When a user clicks on a product displayed on their website and eventually ends up buying it, duckduckgo receives a chunk of commission.
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The Duckduckgo Business Model
Duckduckgo works with big organizations like Amazon, eBay, and others to help promote products on their behalf. For duckduckgo to earn from this, the product bought must be within their attribution window.
This means that the user buying the product has to purchase within 24 hours after clicking on the ad. Some partners allow duckduckgo to get paid even if the user decides to buy a different product from the one they initially clicked on.
The actual percentage paid to duckduckgo depends on the category and the rates, for instance, fashion products pay well more than electronic products.
Tracker Radar
This was launched in March 2020, it is a continuously updated data set that gives details about hidden trackers that other sites or companies utilize. These trackers pick up various data points such as a user’s shopping, location, search history, or browser. And from those, they can often determine your gender, age, hobbies, interests, ethnicity, and other characteristics.
Duckduckgo uses its tracker radar to get overviews of the most commonly used trackers by other sites or companies and their tracking behavior in order to prevent their activities.
DuckDuckGo Valuation, Revenue and Funding
According to Crunchbase, Duckduckgo has made a total of $113 million across three rounds of venture capital funding.
Some of the organization’s investors include OMERS Ventures, Scott Banister (founder of IronPort), Union Square Ventures, Peter Hershberg (co-founder of Reprise Media), and Joshua Schachter (co-creator of Memepool).
Duckduckgo is a private company and therefore, they are not obliged to share their revenue or valuation figures. During an interview with Philly Mag, its CEO, Weinberg said that the company was able to generate over $100 million as revenue for the year, 2020.
While Google made around $183 billion over the same period with its parent company valued at about $1.35 trillion, which is equal to a 10x multiple.
Applying this multiple to DuckDuckGo’s business, we can assume that the company can at least be valued at $1 billion.
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Why is the Number of Duckduckgo Users Unknown?
Firstly, you shouldn’t forget that duckduckgo doesn’t keep track of its user’s data, search history, or credentials. Due to this, the number of users that operate through Duckduckgo is unknown.
According to estimations from some experts, duckduckgo has about 25 million users. This result was estimated from the number of clicks the users made in a day.
So, there’s a possibility of duckduckgo having more than 25 million users because the number of clicks can’t all be possibly calculated right.
Even with these features of duckduckgo, it has its own pros and cons that define it. Below are the pros and cons of using duckduckgo as a browser.
Pros of Duckduckgo as a search engine:
- The data on your online searches are not collected or stored.
- No adverts are targeting you based on your searches.
- You will get the same search results as all other users of duckduckgo
- Duckduckgo uses no social engineering techniques that’s based on your searches or other interests.
Cons of Duckduckgo as a search engine:
- Although it has a few nice features and extra perks, it is not like Google having under branches like Google Flights, Google Maps, Google Books, Google Finance, etc.
- The fact that duckduckgo doesn’t remember your search history can be an advantage for your privacy but sometimes, this can be inconvenient. In cases where you can’t recall your password and duckduckgo can’t auto-fill it for you like how other sites would have done it, this can lead to you going back to recover the account or creating another one.
Frequently Asked Questions: On How Does Duckduckgo Make Money
Duckduckgo doesn’t store your search history as other private search engines do. Other search engines remotely store every detail of your search history on their servers. However, this was never the case for Duckduckgo because your search histories will not be stored.
As you might have known, Duckduckgo doesn’t track its users’ search history, but that doesn’t mean you can’t access it whenever you want to. To access your search history, go to your browser’s historical setting.
Yes, you can browse dark websites using Duckduckgo. Although duckduckgo indexes both surface and. onion websites, it only indexes. onion sites on the dark web, so this is only possible if you make use of the Tor browser.
These bangs are really awesome features that permit you to search within a specific website for the words you want or you’re looking for.
Yes, Duckduckgo has a Password generator. It helps you generate passwords you will need for your credentials, but it doesn’t store these passwords, unlike most browsers. Storing these passwords would therefore be up to you or any tool you use in saving passwords.
Conclusion
Duckduckgo has amazing features that help protect your privacy when you’re browsing with duckduckgo. Some of these features are useful, some are not because they are just pretty designs.
However, there’s no doubt that duckduckgo is aiming to expand its reach as it heads to more popularity helping people protect their privacy.
More users are beginning to notice the usefulness of duckduckgo and they now prefer making use of this privacy-secured browser over Google.
Reference
- productmint.com – The Duckduckgo Business Model- How Does Duckduckgo Make Money?
- techrepublic.com – How Duckduckgo Makes Money Selling Search, Not Privacy
- heimdalsecurity.com – Duckduckgo vs Google: A Security Comparison And How To Maximize Your Privacy
- finxl.com – Duckduckgo vs Google: A Security Comparison And How To Maximize Your Privacy
- searchengineland.com – Why Duckduckgo Matter
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