I'm not sure if this [1] is still relevant, but it appears that Vivaldi makes money by promoting search engines and bookmarks to their users via their closed source, secret, Chromium fork.
If my usage of their Chromium clone is being used to sell search engines/website bookmarks, then I am indeed the product.
There does also seem to be a VPN option on their site that I'm assuming I can pay for, which seems it could be an actually buyable product rather than selling my usage of their browser.
"Being the product" refers to recording user behavior and processing it for gains. Displaying non-personalized ads (which are trivial to completely avoid in Vivaldi) is not that.
That's not really what "being the product" is commonly recognised as.
Vivaldi go out to their customers (that's not you) and say "We have 1000 suckers who have downloaded and use our closed source, Chromium cloned, browser. We can serve your website as a bookmark to them, or add you to their search engine list if you give us $x."
Since you are not their "customer" (that's the people paying them to appear in your settings) what are you? You are the "product", you are what Vivaldi is selling.
That's actually NOT what this phrase implies. It is really about targeted ads and the drive for more ads and more precise targeting based on user data. Look up attention economy.
Vivaldi is not that. The only place where it shows anything remotely like ads is its default start page with prepopulated links and that can be hidden by flipping a single setting. I haven't seen this page for at least a couple of months now o my Vivaldi instances.
You have a different definition of "being the product" than I do. A business that takes money from advertisers in exchange for your attention is selling your attention. You are the product is shorthand for your attention is the product, short of slavery.
But in order to fit the phrase the business has to actively fight for user attention to get the space for ads. This is specifically the search engine and social media model. Vivaldi is not fighting this fight. At all.
