The Ugly Business of Monetizing Browser Extensions

I decided to haggle with these people to see how high they would be willing to go. Based on my handful of data points [# users, max_offer], it seems that these individuals are willing to pay about $0.20 per user.

Now I surely don’t know what the new owners of these extensions are doing with them, but I don’t think their intentions are noble. The vector for abuse is easy to understand: buy a well-used extension, compromise its users, and squeeze the juice however you like. Maybe you steal their credit card numbers, may be you sell their traffic, maybe you use them in a botnet. Again: it’s possible that these acquiring entities do not intend harm, but it sure doesn’t look that way.

To transfer ownership of a Chrome extension, all you have to do is fill out this form. That’s it. The users will not be notified of the new ownership, and their installed extension will continue to silently update with whatever new updates the new owners decide to push out.