$10K’s doesn’t “wildly overvalue” the developer time that goes into a successful browser extension.
At almost $200k/year, a starting google developer makes ~$4K a week (pre tax, but also ignoring health care, facilities, etc).
The browser extension offers are comparable to months of developer time, but since they are made after an extension succeeds, they’re not accounting for the probability that a new extension won’t become wildly popular.
Put another way, if the scammers could develop (or steal) extensions for less than they’re buying them for, I’m sure they would.
Yeah, I did gloss over a bit the distinction between the value of the developer's labor and the value of the extension.
I do think that $200K/year is a wild overestimate of the value of the extension, on the ground that Google and other similar companies assign very few new hires to write browser extensions. But yes, the amount of skill and time and focus that goes into the average extension and the average new hire project is at least within the same order of magnitude.
We are generally bad at finding ways to compensate/monetize people for skilled labor that does useful things for the world but isn't directly profitable, so I think trying to tackle that for the case of extensions is a harder problem than is reasonable to demand.
At almost $200k/year, a starting google developer makes ~$4K a week (pre tax, but also ignoring health care, facilities, etc).
The browser extension offers are comparable to months of developer time, but since they are made after an extension succeeds, they’re not accounting for the probability that a new extension won’t become wildly popular.
Put another way, if the scammers could develop (or steal) extensions for less than they’re buying them for, I’m sure they would.