Cliqz is shutting down
Cliqz was a hypocritical product right from the start, and it never attracted a large userbase. The only reason it survived that long because the company behind Cliqz didn&#x27;t care about throwing lots of money into the idea of creating a competition to google.<p>Second, the product doesn&#x27;t provide any practical benefit to google users, so there is no point to switch.<p>Cliqz didn&#x27;t realize that you can&#x27;t sell privacy as a primary product. Privacy is always a secondary attribute to a real product.<p>That&#x27;s why DuckDuckGo is succesful. It profits from the increasing privacy-awareness, but people use it because it both works and respects privacy.<p>Brave is far from perfect, and to a certain extent it is indeed hypocritical. Brave sells us the idea of decentralization, even though in practice there is no decentralization at all.<p>Other than that, you can&#x27;t compare Cliqz with Brave, and here&#x27;s the reason why Brave will not fail:<p>- First and firemost, they have a consistent monthly growth in their userbase for years
- In contrast to Cliqz who pushes their own products via Ghostery, Brave acts as a neutral middleman, thus creating a direct competition with Google et al., who are also middlemen. In other words, Brave offers every customer the same opportunity to serve ads
- An innovative and unique product: The monthly growth proves this point, as innovation leads to demand.
- user first ideology: Even though Brave wants to be a middleman for a privacy-preserving money-flow between creators and users, they allow the user to chose whether to activate it or not. By default, Brave is just a browser that blocks annoying and privacy-infringing stuff. With Cliqz it is basically impossible to get the Cliqz out of the browser, with Brave I can change my browser in a way as to never see anything related to ads, crypto tokens, etc. and Brave actively respects that decision.<p>As long as Brave respects users like me who deactivate everything in the browser related to ads and crypto schemes, they will continue to have a loyal userbase behind them.