It is true that one of the motivations is to diversify our revenue stream; almost all of our revenue comes from our Search (advertising) deal with Yahoo.

The real reason we are doing it is because modern digital advertising sucks, and we are going to change how it works.

The current ad-tech 'environment' invades your privacy, robs publishers, and delivers deplorable performance for the brand. The only winner right now is the middle-men; the 'programmatic' exchanges and the various money siphons that trade your personal data.

We want to fix that. We are starting by building an ad targeting mechanism in the browser that you can easily control and that doesn't leak your data. Currently, ads will be shown only on the Newtab page, though one could imagine a generalized future version of this capability opened up to all internet publishers.