[asdfasgasdgasdg]

My personal sense (not knowing anything internal about the product) is that uptake is extremely low. It also isn't free to run a product that accepts payment. You have to hook it in to a payment processor, handle fraud, handle a different expectation of support, have a bunch of custom code to handle the paid vs. unpaid case. At Google's scale, there's liability to consider, and various compliance and moderation issues that probably don't exist or are much less serious if you're providing the service for free. It's not a zero-overhead proposition.

[nitrogen]

Continuing the speculation, I'm curious whether that uptake is low in relative or in absolute terms. A small percentage of Google scale is still a big enough business to make a lot of people rich and a lot more comfortably employed.

In a hypothetical world where Google and Alphabet are broken up into a bunch of small companies, would the Extension Store Company be making enough revenue to be viable?

[rswail]

As a counter to this "it's not worth it because of overhead", Google already runs all of this payment/licensing infrastructure to support the Android Play Store, GSuite, GCP etc.

The overhead for the Chrome extension store would be similar but much lower volume than the Android Play store, given that the attack surface (and thus APIs to monitor) are sandboxed by the browser, and the number of extensions is at least an order of magnitude lower than the number of Android apps.

So at "Google scale" this is a rounding error in their payment/licensing space.