It’s not just Honey swapping the affiliate codes. Practically all the major coupon sites do it too. That’s why they require you to click on a coupon code to reveal it. When you click, they usually reveal the coupon code in a new tab, and helpfully redirect the current tab to the store, using their affiliate link.
It’s more obvious when websites do it though, since they can’t auto-close the tab like Honey does. They also don’t automatically pop up at checkout like Honey does.
I imagine some of the other coupon extensions do the exact same thing as Honey though.
I wonder what websites think of this toolbar stealing affiliate links from people doing all the work of promoting their prices. I wonder if Honey goes even further and turns vanilla purchases into affiliate purchases, actively stealing actual money from the site. If I were NewEgg or whoever else Honey has created affiliate links with, I think I’d be banning their affiliate account right now, or throwing in some captchas so their link theft doesn’t work any more.
Technically isn’t telling anybody anything “stealing”? You’re transmitting a copy of the information and whoever created it gets nothing.
Can someone ELI5? Does this mean they used refferal codes from people that had these “bring a friend” referal codes?
some companies, instead of paying youtubers a lot of money to promote the product, tell them ‘we will give you some percentage of every sale we make that was advertised by you’ They do this by giving the youtuber an affiliate link. its basically the link to the product, except for that when you open it you get a cookie that says ‘[youtuber] brought me here’ What honey did, was replace those cookies with theirs, meaning they get the cut from the sale, instead of the youtuber.
with for example, NordVPN, you get 35 dollars per sale with your affiliate link. if you watched a youtube video about NordVPN and then went into the description to buy it with the YouTubers affiliate link, honey would pop up and say ‘we have no coupons for you’ if you clicked on the close button of the popup honey would replace that cookie with theirs; if you would currently buy a NordVPN subscription, the money would go to honey, instead of to the youtuber that advertised it to you (who deserve the money)
No, it’s a little more complicated than that. How a video explained it was, say someone was trying to sell you a TV, you decide to buy that TV and the salesman gives you a card to let the cashier know who the salesman was to get the commission. When you’re at the checkout line, a different sales man comes up and offers to find you a coupon code to help save you money. In the process of looking, regardless of if a coupon code is found, the second salesman takes the original card the previous salesman gives you and switches it with his own unbeknownst to you or the original salesman. Then when you buy the product the second guy gets the commission.
Damm, that’s shady and morally awful
It’s owned by PayPal, couldn’t expect otherwise
I just bought some local honey. Don’t know what this shit is, hopefully I never will.
bee puke
If you dont know how a business makes money, chances are its some shady stuff
Providing coupons on stuff for free, with zero ads? Thats pretty weird. Being Bought by PayPal for 4 BILLION dollars?!?!? There has to be some real sketchy shit.
Why am I entirely not surprised that LMG knew what the fuck was going on, and didnt say a fuckin thing about it.
Made more public comments over legitimate criticism about his “just trust me, bro” warranty, than about honey being a out and out scam.
Never watched the channel, but I would guess that being tech-themed makes it a worse look that they promoted it for so long before catching the issue, so they were worried it would cast doubt on all other endorsements and tank the value of advertising with them.
I knew this shit was too good to be true!!
It’s kind of ridiculous how long it has taken for people to realise that this is happening… where did people think that their referrals had gone after they cratered?
People realised years ago but didn’t really care much. End users generally don’t care since it doesn’t directly impact them, and “influencers” will often take a sponsorship deal without thoroughly researching the product or service being advertised, and probably just figured that people were buying less stuff due to the economy or whatever.
The tech-savvy people that realised what’s happening tend to either avoid afilliate links, or use a cash back service (TopCashback, Rakuten, etc) that requires you to use their affiliate link.
It’s not just Honey doing this. Practically all the major coupon sites do it too.
Was it not obvious that the extension was doing that and scraping your browser data?
Scraping data yes Scraping affiliate links? No
I’m glad this information is coming to light because I think that it should be fixed, at least as far as the affiliate link piece goes, but I find myself irritated by the sensationalism of the poster.
They’re really pushing to make this seem as evil as possible, and milking it for every drop it’s worth. Making this a two-part series and not exposing it immediately feels super shitty to me.
Just post the full information you have, if this is really so bad, stop trying to farm clips.
Also, not enough focus on the timeline. Honey’s business model has changed dramatically since it was released long ago, and I feel like the part two video is going to complain about the original Honey business model, which was literally just a coupon code aggregator, just based on the “cliffhanger” at the end
The dude spent a year figuring this out, researching and getting all his ducks in a row. What did you do, whats your contribution? Oh, let’s see, you bravely complained in a comments section about the way he chose to release the info, accusing him of the crime of sensationalism for clicks.
Gee, why would he want to get paid for his work?? HOW SELFISH! It’s not like there are companies out there trying to steal content creator revenue, right??
The way you complain more about him than the company, makes me wonder, do you work for Paypal, or that new project, Pie? Just weird to see you trying to make him look bad for wanting to get paid for his work. Sounds like a Honey thing to do.
My guy take it down a notch, damn. I’m not calling for his head on a pike, I have legitimate and valid criticisms. I apologize if the tone came off more critical than I meant it but hot hell you came in spicy.
But, to address your issue:
Why does one wrong make a right? Why does him exposing the issue invalidate any criticisms or expectations of quality or integrity? To me it does not, hence why I criticize. And I even said I was glad the information is coming to light, and I’m grateful for him drawing attention to it, I just wish it could have been done a little more tactfully is all. I would like to have all the information right now, rather than waiting for a “part 2”.
I also just don’t appreciate the stoking of anger, which has clearly worked. Ragebait is toxic and that’s what is being done with this story, from my perspective, so I don’t love it.
it should be fixed
It’s not a mistake, but an incredibly unethical business model. Why minimize the issue?
not exposing it immediately feels super shitty to me
it doesn’t change anything to the facts though
It’s serialization, as old as printed news. You can dislike that but it’s not like he’s the only one doing it
If you look at their history, they seem to be a younger YouTube channel. I think he’s breaking it up more so that he can actually put out one video a month and not lose subscribers. He seems to be slowly managing to make the videos longer each month.
I suspected it was a smaller channel, but didn’t look myself. I haven’t heard of them up until this point so this story could be a particularly big opportunity for them, so it makes sense why they are choosing the delivery method that they are
That’s absurd
I am fine with them scamming influencers. I am not fine with them being paid by websites to not give the best deals
What kind of rat is fine with scammers?
Scamming the scammers is fun
So all influencers are scammers…?
I’m all for scamming scammers, but I’m quite happy to give a tip to YouTubers I watch by way of e-commerce commissions.
Topcashback consistently beats honey and others out (almost all competitors beat honey btw). And they pay out and have customer support. Easily thr best way to sell your personal data to a shadowy data broker
All TopCashback is doing is taking the commission and giving you some of it. They take less of a cut than other sites like Rakuten, which I guess they can do since they have fewer overheads (eg I’ve never seen a TV ad for them). I don’t think they’re selling any user data.
The permissions on their extension allows for them to read site data so they definitely could operate as a data broker. However their tos has no mention of any data sharing so you are likely correct that they just take a commission. Great site imo
I didn’t even realise they have an extension. I just use the site.
I also use CashbackMonitor.com, which lets you look up a site and see a list of all the cashback sites that support it. Sometimes, during promotions (like Black Friday), Rakuten’s cashback is temporarily higher than TopCashback’s.
Your okay with a large corporation stealing from the working class? Why is that? I’m sure only a very few of the make good money.
well, this segment of the working class are selling obvious scams to their audience, so its a funny ironic justice. People like Linus from LTT, only stopped because he found out they are scamming him as well, not just the audience.
Yep. and he decided to let the scam keep happening to everyone else by being absolutely silencio on the subject.
Maybe because anyone who calls themselves “influencers” are just as bad as corporate execs, but, oftentimes, more insistent/stupid in their shilling so people hate them more.
So you hate sales people in general
lol “influencers” are trash
I don’t think they said that. However, I am. For the most part they are my enemy.
Almost every one who has tried to sell to me yeah.
I knew Honey was sketchy, but I just assumed it made it’s money from just data harvesting everything
Yeah I always felt something was off with honey. I never downloaded it for that reason, it was just kinda too good to be real or something. Like how are they making enough money to pay all these YouTubers to promote them? Something wasn’t adding up
how are they making enough money to pay all these YouTubers to promote them? Something wasn’t adding up
- Know average amount of revenue a customer gives you over some period of time
- Figure out what percentage of that you’re willing to lose
- Get a loan
- Use that loan to pay to advertise to get customers you wouldn’t have anyways
- After the period of time (mentioned in step one) passes you’ll have a profit if everything went correctly
It’s not really a mystery.
If you have multiple extensions installed honey always secretly steals the revenue from competitors without asking for consent. Most other extensions will ask if you want to activate cashback. Honey just disables their competitors and steals that affiliate revenue. It should be classified as malware
The thing is I think it’s feasible to do this in a non gross way…it’s essentially a search engine that just looks for promo codes, matches them against brands, and then tries them in rapid succession on the checkout screen. I think they would probably need humans to resolve the many 1-off issues (could work in a crowdsource manner like adblock filters) and a central registry to keep track of which ones fail, but it’s not a hugely complex problem.
Do people not immediately google “How does X make money” or is that just me?
It is about Honey hijacking the referrals, which wasn’t known until a youtuber made a video about it (or at least not widely known)
The problem is that a lot of these startups don’t make money. The enshittification comes later, first stage is just burning through VC cash to establish market share.
I feel like I’ve searched it up for honey, but the search results said the same thing as the YouTubers shilling it. Didn’t download it anyway because of how many people were advertising it. Anyone who uses that much money to advertise can’t be getting their money in a reasonable manner.
I have, for some businesses I’ve wondered about. For example, I use the virtual cycling platform Zwift, which charges a monthly or annual fee to use. The biggest competitor, Rouvy, also charges a fee. Makes sense, it takes money to develop these things, buy and maintain servers, etc. The income and expenses are obvious. (Zwift does offer bike frames and wheels from real world brands; I assume the brands paid something to be included.)
Enter MyWhoosh. Free to use, so the income side is unclear. From some searching, they claim they’ll generate revenue via ads - but I doubt that would generate enough to support the platform.
The company is based out of Abu Dhabi, so I assume it’s really sportswashing - they’re just dumping a bunch of money into it and not really caring that it isn’t making money (at least for now).
I’m sticking with Zwift (in part because I have it working under Linux and Wine).
No need to do even that. If a simple piece of software becomes a company, it’s 99% a scam.
I didn’t Google it. I just figured, if it found me a 10% discount, the vendor would also send Honey some % of what I paid for the product.
I’m that cynical i just avoid anything being shilled by a YouTuber. I assume if they’re pushing it this hard it must be nefarious in some way and I spend no more time thinking about it.
I will drop my subs for channels that shill this stuff though once it becomes evident it’s shady.
They do, but then a trusted “insider” youtuber or podcaster who they have a years long parasocial relationship with “signs off” on the product and the person says to themselves, “X person has integrity and they are very smart, they wouldn’t put their name on Y unless they did a lot of homework, so I don’t have to.”
And life is difficult, complicated and overwhelming, so you can’t really blame “normal” folks for putting the faith their put into their tech saavy nephew into these personalities. The influencers should pause though and accept that if they can’t enthusiastically describe the reason a thing is actually legitimate, they should refrain from endorsing it.
Fuck PayPal and its related entities and all executives past, present and future. And I guess fuck you too now, Will Ferrell - you cosigned Mel Gibson in whatever the fuck that daddy movie series was and now you’re the face of these fucks? The “PayPal mafia” (cringe) literally just bought the US election. I know you need to bankroll a lot of family trips to Sweden, but you got too much obviously dirty money now, Will. Hard to chuckle at your comedies now, and that’s a bummer.
You don’t seem like you’re ok.
Cybertruck breakdown?
