So the whining about money has started, as I guessed long back. Gradually, they'd start doing things that were originally 'against' their idea of how DDG should have been, "but as you know the other people are so evil, we have to do it". I had liked the idea behind their search engine (and keep coming back to try it), but never liked the kind of promotion that they have carried out so far (which mostly includes criticizing a single other competitor and that's all). That type of advertising is never sustainable in my opinion.
I agree that competitors should be standing on their own two feet and not spend energy knocking down competitors. To be fair to them, elaborating on the privacy conundrum in respect to monetisation is a good thing and difficult to put into an elevator pitch to the casual user.
Naturally Bing has outbid them considering DDG are serving Bing ads minus Bing's cut. They were always going to be in that position.
