PayPal acquires maker of shopping extension Honey for $4 Billion
PayPal announced the acquisition of Honey Science Corporation on November 20, 2019. The acquired company is best known for its shopping extension Honey.
Honey is one of the most popular extensions for Google Chrome; in fact, it is one of the few extensions that crossed the ten million user mark on the Chrome Web Store. The extension is also available for other web browsers including Firefox and the classic Microsoft Edge web browser.
Honey is a shopping extension that looks up items at other retailers to provide potential shoppers with coupons or better prices. The main idea behind the extension is to inform users if the item is available for a better price elsewhere or if coupons are available to reduce the price on the active site.
The technology that Honey uses tests coupons semi-automatically on the shopping site and may apply the best coupon that works to the checkout process automatically.
The service is also available as a mobile application -- called Honey Smart Shopping Assistant -- and there are also options to browse available coupons and promotions on the official website. Honey may furthermore track item prices for its users to inform them when the price of an item drops below a set threshold.
There is also a rewards program called Honey Gold which rewards members with a virtual currency that they may redeem for gift cards.
Honey earns money from affiliate commissions. Whenever users of the browser extension or site make purchases, Honey earns a percentage that is paid by the shopping site.
Honey claims that it saved its customers $1 billion in the past year alone, that it has 17 million active users per month, and it works across 30,000 online retailers.
According to Forbes, Honey made an estimated revenue of about $100 million US Dollars in 2018.
PayPal revealed that it paid "approximately $4 billion" US Dollars for the company and its products. The company wants to combine Honey with PayPal's "two-sided network" to "transform the shopping experience for PayPal consumers" and to increase "sales and customer engagement" for PayPal merchants.
PayPal has not mentioned specifics in regards to integration of Honey in PayPal products or vice versa. It seems likely that Honey and PayPal will benefit from the deal in the long run.
Honey co-founder Ryan Hudson provided the following statement.
"Combining PayPal’s assets and reach with our technology, we can build powerful new online shopping experiences for consumers and merchants,†said Hudson. “We’ll have the ability to help millions of retailers efficiently reach consumers with offers that deliver more and more value to Honey members."
Closing Words
Four billion is a huge sum of money for a browser extension and technology. It is too early to tell if the acquisition will have a negative impact as well.
Now You: Have you used Honey? What's your take on the news?
Doesn’t Windows 8 know that www. or http:// are passe ?
Well it is a bit difficulty to distinguish between name.com domains and files for instance.
I know a service made by google that is similar to Google bookmarks.
http://www.google.com/saved
@Ashwin–Thankful you delighted my comment; who knows how many “gamers” would have disagreed!
@Martin
The comments section under this very article (3 comments) is identical to the comments section found under the following article:
https://www.ghacks.net/2023/08/15/netflix-is-testing-game-streaming-on-tvs-and-computers/
Not sure what the issue is, but have seen this issue under some other articles recently but did not report it back then.
Omg a badge!!!
Some tangible reward lmao.
It sucks that redditors are going to love the fuck out of it too.
With the cloud, there is no such thing as unlimited storage or privacy. Stop relying on these tech scums. Purchase your own hardware and develop your own solutions.
This is a certified reddit cringe moment. Hilarious how the article’s author tries to dress it up like it’s anything more than a png for doing the reddit corporation’s moderation work for free (or for bribes from companies and political groups)
Almost al unlmited services have a real limit.
And this comment is written on the dropbox article from August 25, 2023.
First comment > @ilev said on August 4, 2012 at 7:53 pm
For the God’s sake, fix the comments soon please! :[
Yes. Please. Fix the comments.
With Google Chrome, it’s only been 1,500 for some time now.
Anyone who wants to force me in such a way into buying something that I can get elsewhere for free will certainly never see a single dime from my side. I don’t even know how stupid their marketing department is to impose these limits on users instead of offering a valuable product to the paying faction. But they don’t. Even if you pay, you get something that is also available for free elsewhere.
The algorithm has also become less and less savvy in terms of e.g. English/German translations. It used to be that the bot could sort of sense what you were trying to say and put it into different colloquialisms, which was even fun because it was like, “I know what you’re trying to say here, how about…” Now it’s in parts too stupid to translate the simplest sentences correctly, and the suggestions it makes are at times as moronic as those made by Google Translations.
If this is a deep-learning AI that learns from users’ translations and the phrases they choose most often – which, by the way, is a valuable, moneys worthwhile contribution of every free user to this project: They invest their time and texts, thereby providing the necessary data for the AI to do the thing as nicely as they brag about it in the first place – alas, the more unprofessional users discovered the translator, the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, the greater the aggregate of linguistically illiterate users has become, and the worse the language of this deep-learning bot has become, as it now learns the drivel of every Tom, Dick and Harry out there, which is why I now get their Mickey Mouse language as suggestions: the inane language of people who can barely spell the alphabet, it seems.
And as a thank you for our time and effort in helping them and their AI learn, they’ve lowered the limit from what was once 5,000 to now 1,500…? A big “fuck off” from here for that! Not a brass farthing from me for this attitude and behaviour, not in a hundred years.
When will you put an end to the mess in the comments?
Ghacks comments have been broken for too long. What article did you see this comment on? Reply below. If we get to 20 different articles we should all stop using the site in protest.
I posted this on [https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/] so please reply if you see it on a different article.
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Comment redirected me to [https://www.ghacks.net/2012/08/04/add-search-the-internet-to-the-windows-start-menu/] which seems to be the ‘real’ article it is attached to
Article Title: Reddit enforces user activity tracking on site to push advertising revenue
Article URL: https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
No surprises here. This is just the beginning really. I cannot see a valid reason as to why anyone would continue to use the platform anymore when there are enough alternatives fill that void.
I’m not sure if there is a point in commenting given that comments seem to appear under random posts now, but I’ll try… this comment is for https://www.ghacks.net/2023/09/28/reddit-enforces-user-activity-tracking-on-site-to-push-advertising-revenue/
My temporary “solution”, if you can call it that, is to use a VPN (Mullvad in my case) to sign up for and access Reddit via a European connection. I’m doing that with pretty much everything now, at least until the rest of the world catches up with GDPR. I don’t think GDPR is a magical privacy solution but it’s at least a first step.