I'm going to be following very closely how Arc approaches monetization. Don't think they've talked much about this yet. Right now they are towing the line between art project and business extremely well so far, but I wonder how this will work at scale once they're through the honeymoon early adoption phase.
It doesn't work. What's the business? This tiny subscription thing is going nowhere. How do they grow? It's coasting on VC money and a tiny staff. Without the user numbers, the subscriptions cannot work. Without the user numbers, search referral cannot work. With 10ish (a guess) employees maybe they can keep going for a while, but growing staff enough to even build a business, if they can't get user numbers up organically, will require staff that won't be sustainable. This feels like another Maxthon/MyIE to me.