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PayPal to acquire shopping and rewards platform Honey for $4B

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Re: PayPal to acquire shopping and rewards platform Honey for $4B

#71

Post by wp381640 »

I pulled the Honey extension a while ago to poke through it in order to better understand it and the first interesting thing I found is that despite the Google order that they'll no longer allow obfuscated Chrome extensions[0] the Honey extension is still - a year later - a large 2MB+ Javascript blob (webpack compiled and minified) [1]

I've been meaning to go back into it to figure out what exactly they're doing but never found the time

$4B cash on an extension that is at the mercy of Google and it's ever-changing rules and sporadic enforcement seems a risk

[0] https://blog.chromium.org/2018/10/trustworthy-chrome-extensi...

[1] https://robwu.nl/crxviewer/?crx=https%3A%2F%2Fchrome.google....

Re: PayPal to acquire shopping and rewards platform Honey for $4B

#73

Post by yellow_lead »

n8henry wrote: post #72

One of their early employees did an "Ask Me Anything" on Reddit about 5 years ago. It is pretty interesting. https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1vjj51/i_am_one_of_th...

> data collection companies that have tried to buy user data

> We turned them all down.

Guess that didn't last long.

Re: PayPal to acquire shopping and rewards platform Honey for $4B

#74

Post by lacker »

wp381640 wrote: post #71

I pulled the Honey extension a while ago to poke through it in order to better understand it and the first interesting thing I found is that despite the Google order that they'll no longer allow obfuscated Chrome extensions[0] the Honey extension is still - a year later - a large 2MB+ Javascript blob (webpack compiled and minified) [1] I've been meaning to go back into it to figure out what exactly they're doing but…

AFAICT, Google allows minified extensions, just not obfuscated ones. A quick browse through the Honey source code suggests to me that they are appropriately minifying and not obfuscating, because many of their variable names are comprehensible.

Re: PayPal to acquire shopping and rewards platform Honey for $4B

#75

Post by mmanfrin »

sturgill wrote: post #47
bowmessage wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How are online retailers ok with this? Surely this violates referral kickback ToS or something? Doesn't seem fair to not pay the _real_ referrer that leads to a purchase.

Rewards and coupon websites are notorious for leaching off the affiliate process without driving much incremental revenue. In the heyday of ABestWeb.com they coined the phrase ParasiteWare for places that stuff cookies like this. The overall affiliate channel has become increasingly challenging to manage profitably from a merchant perspective. But it’s very easy for a “manager” to see all of the sales affiliates “dri…

> that stuff cookies like this.

It should be noted that cookie stuffing is a term for a specific process where a site will inject cookies for thousands of sites with their own referral code on pageload of a landing site they control. It is highly illegal and people have served jail time for it, as it is considered fraud.

What coupon sites do is they tend to hide codes behind a button that onclick will load the retailer's site with their affiliate code, then show the code.

Re: PayPal to acquire shopping and rewards platform Honey for $4B

#76

Post by maerF0x0 »

durbin wrote: post #50
maerF0x0 wrote: post #26

CamelCamelCamel had no idea what it was worth, Retailmenot missed the boat, wikibuy can now market itself for 4B to Square or something.

Wikibuy was already acquired by Capital One.

you're right! I never realized

https://www.capitalone.com/tech/software-engineering/saving-...

Re: PayPal to acquire shopping and rewards platform Honey for $4B

#77

Post by Maxious »

airstrike wrote: post #43
rconti wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's so odd, because Venmo is both newer than PayPal, yet limited in the same stupid ways PayPal is (multi-stage xfers), which Square Cash avoids entirely. It's perplexing to me that Venmo ever caught on.

Network effects. Square Cash is vastly superior but Venmo is the incumbent so it's hard to tell your friends "no, I have this other cash app you should install instead"

Hence the slogan "we're not using the other apps anymore" https://www.reddit.com/r/FriendsofthePod/comments/8pgbpq/wha... https://twitter.com/square/status/968602892646023169?lang=en

Re: PayPal to acquire shopping and rewards platform Honey for $4B

#79

Post by idunno246 »

lccarrasco wrote: post #16
kevindong wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Importantly however, Venmo doesn't make money on peer to peer transactions that use bank accounts, which I'd imagine is what most people do as that's free. Consequently, Venmo is not profitable. https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/24/venmo-has-40-million-users-p... .

Venmo transactions' data and the social network inferences you can make from them are probably pretty valuable on their own.

I don’t see how that data is all that valuable. There’s the inherent network effect of needing to install it to send/receive money from a friend who did.

But a surprising number of people will pay for instant transfer(almost all of that 300m probably comes from this), and the debit cards they get to take in a portion of the merchant transaction fees. They’ll probably be profitable off that, with p2p as a loss leader to drive installs

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