Interesting that the author, Callum Locke, seems to be a real person with a real reputation to damage. Previously this would have been a trust signal to me, I figured real developers would be less likely to go rogue given the consequences.

▲ extesy 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Depends on the personal situation. An extension with 2 million users can generate a very meaningful revenue. My extension has only 300k users, but offers that I received over years [0] would have been significant in some lower-income country.

[0] https://github.com/extesy/hoverzoom/discussions/670

▲ robocat 6 hours ago | parent [-]

Extracts from two different offers:

  For example, your income for the 10k users will be ~ $ 1000 per month, users 20k ~ $ 2000 per month… 100к users ~10 000 $, and so on.

  ARPDAU (Average Revenue Per Daily Active User) basis - In average we have $0.007-0.011/user, US is $0.018.

	▲	onion2k an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Surely it's reasonable to assume that a company doing some dubious 'marketing intelligence' scraping of people's data from a Chrome plugin is going to both inflate the numbers they put in offers and try to scam their way out of paying if you actually accept. I wouldn't consider them real offers. They're marketing. The real world payments, if you get them, would be lower.

▲ ayewo 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The tempation is quite strong, especially for popular extensions

Here's what it can look like to an author of a popular extension:

https://github.com/extesy/hoverzoom/discussions/670

▲ rzmmm 6 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Browser extension maintainers routinely get contacted by more or less shady directions. This is likely a case of maintainer selling out after getting a good offer.

▲ username223 3 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Well, Callum Locke has certainly torched his reputation. Not “spreading Santorum” level… yet.