They lost a lot of credibility when they put an affiliate links automatically without any disclosure.
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-aff...
Source: https://www.theverge.com/2020/6/8/21283769/brave-browser-aff...
I get that it's unethical do it without users consent,
but I am personally OK with anyone using affiliate links for whatever I subscribe to. I don't lose anything, I don't pay for it, some company is letting other people or smaller companies increase budget. I often ask my colleagues if they can get me referral link before I signup for something. What's wrong with it?
A widget hand-made by an owner-operator in small-town USA who sells from his own website gets ignored while the Amazon-listed widget made in a Chinese sweatshop gets shilled because Amazon pays affiliates.
This can be used to track users across the web without their knowledge or consent.
However I don't know Brave's implementation here. Just answering the question in the abstract.
It has a taste of paying too much if the vendor can afford to give a fraction to the affiliate.
Of course you pay for it, it's the same thing as free shipping: the seller increases its prices to take into account how much they're going to pay to affiliates.
Well, a lot of reporting on the affiliate code situation partly mischaracterized what actually happened. There was an auto-complete suggestion that was auto-selecting when you pressed "enter", and it was fixed shortly thereafter. There is a blog post about it called "On Partner Referral Codes in Brave Suggested Sites".
That said, it does essentially the same thing Firefox does when you do a search on Firefox. Try right now: go into Firefox, type in a search in the URL bar, press enter, and you'll see it appends/"injects" a Firefox "affiliate code" as a query parameter so that Firefox gets a cut from Google. One salient difference is that Firefox's "affiliate code" is a vanity code (human readable: "?client=firefox-b-d"), so it isn't viscerally shocking.
If it read "?client=brave" like it does on Firefox, it's very likely no one would have ever cared!