New Tab and Extension Inventory, Bought on Provenance

Before any bid we look at the install curve. An extension that went from twenty thousand users to nine hundred thousand in six weeks did not get there through Chrome Web Store search, and whatever put it there is the thing that eventually takes the listing down and your campaign with it. Roughly half the new tab inventory offered to us fails this check, which is why the plans we write for this channel are smaller than the ones you have already been shown. The provenance check: Four things on every property before money moves. The install trajectory measured against listing age. Review sentiment with the date it turned, which is usually when an extension changed hands or changed behaviour. The ownership record, where a transfer inside twelve months is a decline unless the buyer is named and known to us. And the manifest: which permissions it holds against what its stated single purpose actually requires. An extension asking for host permissions on all URLs to serve a wallpaper new tab is not an inventory opportunity. What we buy: New tab placements where the ad sits in a defined visible slot and the extension's stated purpose is the reason people installed it. Sponsored tiles behave like a low-intent homepage placement, so they get bought as reach under a frequency cap rather than as direct response. The click-through rate you were quoted was almost certainly measured on a first-week install cohort and will not survive contact with a mature user base; we plan against the mature number and revise upward if the data earns it. Manifest V3, and what it changed: declarativeNetRequest replaced blocking webRequest, so an extension can no longer rewrite requests at runtime the way the older affiliate-injection stack did. Any network still selling that behaviour is running on unpacked builds, enterprise-installed deployments, or Firefox, and the volume they quote you is not Chrome volume. We ask which one it is, and the answer decides whether we buy. On building your own: Occasionally right, usually not. It makes sense when you already have an audience with a daily reason to open a tool: a fitness brand with a large logged-in weekly base, a property portal where saved searches are a habit. Then the extension is a retention surface that happens to carry your own inventory, and the real cost is a two-person maintenance commitment for as long as it exists. If you are considering it as a traffic source rather than as a product, the answer is no, and this engagement ends with a two-page memo saying so instead of a build. What we refuse: Install bases assembled through bundled installers or paid-install networks, whatever the current wrapper is called. Affiliate cookie overwriting, which is theft from your own partners and eventually a lawsuit with discovery attached. Search default hijacking. And any operator who will not tell us how their installs were acquired, because the refusal is itself the answer. What you get: A ranked inventory list with the provenance file behind each entry, so a decline is auditable rather than a matter of taste. Negotiated rates and insertion terms, including a clause tying payment to listing status, since an extension delisted mid-flight otherwise leaves you holding prepaid impressions. Creative specs for the slot. And a kill protocol: what triggers pulling spend within an hour, who executes it, and where the money moves instead. Who this is wrong for: Anyone who needs this channel to carry a meaningful share of a growth plan. Clean new tab supply is small, and the honest ceiling is usually a supporting line rather than a pillar. Also wrong for advertisers who cannot tolerate a placement disappearing without notice, which in this channel happens on Google's timetable and not ours.