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Anecdata: I develop an open source Chrome extension that's fairly niche but has about 80k active users, and I still get emails like this a couple of times a yea
by 1986 5y ago
Anecdata: I develop an open source Chrome extension that's fairly niche but has about 80k active users, and I still get emails like this a couple of times a year. They tend largely to be offers for outright buying the extension (and thus install base, presumably to augment with ad- or malware); it's interesting to see how these kinds of offers to a more generally popular extension differ a bit (seemingly more asks to collect & sell user data rather than just taking over ownership)
Another thing I'd note for context is that Hover Zoom probably has a pretty broad hosts permission in order to allow it to operate on many types of sites (my extension, which is a web analytics DevTools extension, also needs an all hosts permission [to my chagrin, as it often makes the Chrome Web Store review process more difficult] ) which I would imagine makes it a more appealing target
- uh_uh 5y agoHow much do they offer you if I'm not too blunt?
- 1986 5y agoSome samples from the last ~year: - "expected $800/mo" for an affiliate ID injector - "up to $50 per 1000 daily actives" for search engine override The purchase requests largely take the form of "if you're interested in selling, please respond" and I don't really feel like opening that dialogue, so can't answer that part.
- uh_uh 5y agoInteresting, thanks! What is an "affiliate ID injector" in this context?
- danielheath 5y agoAmazon pays affiliates money each time they refer you to purchase something on Amazon. They check the referral by giving you an affiliate id, which you can add as a query param to urls on your pages. Injecting your id into unrelated pages gets you affiliate rewards sooner.
- pjc50 5y agoI imagine it injects affiliate links - ie if you search for something on Amazon, the affiliate payment would be attributed to the extension's owner. This would include overwriting existing affiliate links too.
- 1986 5y agoAffiliate marketing pays out a fee to an affiliate (i.e. referral source) when a user makes a purchase, normally to the last-touch source using a unique affiliate id (e.g. Wirecutter constructs an Amazon link that contains their ID, so they get some money back when you buy one of their recommended products). With certain extension permissions, malicious actors can replace these instances of IDs with their own, or cause all Amazon links to contain their affiliate ID, etc, thus falsely claiming that payout for themselves.
- michaelbuckbee 5y agoSome blog has a link to Amazon (or wherever) and the extension modifies it to include the referral code of the affiliate.