PayPal To Acquire Shopping and Rewards Program Honey For $4 Billion (techcrunch.com) 13
PayPal announced today it has agreed to acquire Honey Science Corporation, the makers of a deal-finding browser add-on and mobile application, for $4 billion, mostly cash. TechCrunch reports: The acquisition, which is PayPal's largest to date, will give the payments giant a foothold earlier in the customer's shopping journey. Instead of only competing on the checkout page against credit cards or Apple Pay, for example, PayPal will leap ahead to become a part of the deal discovery process, as well. Currently, Honey's 17 million monthly active users take advantage of its suite of money-saving tools to track prices, get alerts, make lists, browse offers and participate in an Ebates-like rewards program called Honey Gold. Its users tend to be younger, millennial shoppers, both male and female. PayPal aims to add Honey's technology to its own product line, expanding its reach to PayPal's 300 million users.
In addition, PayPal's network of 24 million merchant partners will gain the ability to offer targeted and more personalized promotions to consumers as a means of acquiring new business and driving increased sales. PayPal Credit may also be integrated into Honey to help finance larger purchases. [...] As a result of the acquisition, Honey co-founders George Ruan and Ryan Hudson will join PayPal where they'll work on product integrations and scaling the technology to a much larger user base. Also joining is Honey's predominantly L.A.-based team of 350 employees. The Honey team and headquarters will remain in L.A., where they've just signed a lease on a new office space with expansion goals in mind.
In addition, PayPal's network of 24 million merchant partners will gain the ability to offer targeted and more personalized promotions to consumers as a means of acquiring new business and driving increased sales. PayPal Credit may also be integrated into Honey to help finance larger purchases. [...] As a result of the acquisition, Honey co-founders George Ruan and Ryan Hudson will join PayPal where they'll work on product integrations and scaling the technology to a much larger user base. Also joining is Honey's predominantly L.A.-based team of 350 employees. The Honey team and headquarters will remain in L.A., where they've just signed a lease on a new office space with expansion goals in mind.
Go go Second Dotcom Bubble! (Score:2)
That's a lot of money to pay for eyeballs. Hope they can make it up in volume.
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Recall that Honey is tracking every single site their user visits.
If we do some math here, 4b/17m = $235/user, according to the article last year 10m users saved 800m, so $80 per user. So users are selling their data short by at least $155.
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Indeed, I launched the calculator before I was done reading the article. Hard to believe that those users are worth $235 each to PayPal, especially since many of them would already be PayPal customers. They had better be paying for some pretty phenomenal technology, but a web crawler that seeks out coupons doesn't seem that revolutionary.
bad sign (Score:3)
PayPal is indifferently functional already. They sent my money to a non-existent account. When I asked them about it, I got an irrelevant form letter back, talked to two different people who didn't have any idea what was going on or any way to fix it, and then stone silence.
They wasted more time doing that than the money was worth, not to them, and not to me. I wrote it off but, I'm clear that they're not reliable or trustworthy.
The last few times I had problems with real banks, they fixed it up immediately. One of them actually gave me a hefty credit to apologize. (They no longer exist. They've been absorbed by the completely scuzzy Capital One bank, which took the existing excellent security policies and replaced them with garbage before destroying the web interface).
Uninstalling Honey in (Score:2)
I didn't use it all that often but it did save me a few bucks here and there. PayPal OTOH is a parasite that needs to be excised.
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Coincidentally, I actually deleted my Honey account just yesterday since I never found it particularly useful for anything. Couldn’t have been better timing!
Re:Uninstalling Honey in (Score:4)
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Also came to say I'm uninstalling (Score:2)