Before, this is how ALL coupon sites/extensions have worked for decades.
I'm frankly baffled it weren't more common knowledge, despite being common sense, before the MegaLag video. Did people really think that sites like retailmenot.com or wethrift.com make you open tabs to the shop you're searching for coupons for before you can see the coupon code just for fun??
Affiliate code stuffing is the coupon provider business model, it's not Honey-exclusive at all. I'd be surprised if you find a coupon site/extension that haven't always done that.
It is pretty funny how the MegaLag video claimed it was hard to find discussion of this online, and cited a HN thread from over five years ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21588663
I suppose it's easy for us to forget how an average person really doesn't think about how cookies and referral links work.
Not even just questioning how referral links work, but questioning how a company makes money. I never looked into Honey, but since it wasn't obvious how they were making their money, I assumed it was something sketchy and stayed away from it. My assumption was it was the typical data harvesting and selling (once they had the extension in your browser they could track you). While I think the tracking/selling is immoral, what they did instead seems like fraud (IANAL).
I'm pretty surprised that so many YouTube creators pushed Honey without questioning how they were making money off giving away discounts. Did they not ask, or did Honey have a lie for that as well?
I guess they say it, but being owned by PayPal I'm guessing there was an assumption that the commissions weren't being stolen from other people, and the codes being provided were organic codes and not ones created for Honey by the merchant to manipulate the user into thinking they were getting the best deal, when they weren't.
I read the HN link after the video though, and it was full of vague misunderstandings of exactly what honey was doing, even if people did understand the technical logistics. Some of the dark patterns honey goes through to get a user to click any link or button is pretty shady.
Yeah, as I watched the video all I could think was "what the fuck did you think they were doing?". I'm surprised technical youtube channels were caught by it, although maybe they did the calculation that the money Honey was paying was worth more than the affiliate sales they'd lose. There's also value to getting that money immediately, rather than at some unknown point in the future.
The only part that seemed uncouth to me was setting the referral code when they hadn't actually found any coupons, and collaborating with retailers.
You want to stick your lawyers on them and try to punish them and extract as much money as you can out of them? Fine. Whatever.
>> not screwing over their partners and customers?
I wasn't around to organically take in this situation, but being introduced to Honey by seeing this blow up today, I can only say: "...no? I don't think so?"
Take, for example, the wild west days of rampant SEO exploitation (I'm talking like 2000s or 2010s era) and its race to the bottom, and Google's subsequent refinement of the SEO program over the years. Why am I supposed to root for one side over the other, again?
Their bottom line purpose is the revenue stream; this is not a FOSS project that does so much as to not even solicit donations.
--
I hope the top thread writer from that HN discussion five years ago is having a field day dancing on top of his I-told-you-so mountain :)
> I'm surprised technical youtube channels were caught by it, although maybe they did the calculation that the money Honey was paying was worth more than the affiliate sales they'd lose.
... and helping to screw everyone else over in the process. That is what makes advertising for Honey so unethical.
From watching the original video sounds like that’s exactly what LinusMedia did. Which doesn’t surprise me, I’ve always been amazed by how many people like that channel.
In my defense I assumed they were a user data-mining scam, not a coupon code scam. Still never used it and told people not to whenever they asked, but, whatcha gonna do.
Honestly I knew that that coupon websites were adding their affiliate link to links from their websites, but it never occurred to me that the toolbars would be stripping and replacing affiliate links from actual links you were clicking yourself.
I wouldn't mind if they were transparent about what they were doing or gave you the option to substitute your own code specifically. I'm sure there are a lot of situations where I've clicked an affiliate link to check something out and then that affiliate got credit for other things I've purchased hours or days later. I'd really like a toolbar that let me modify or block the affiliate code from those links.
When I'm actually looking for coupons I tend to use an incognito window, but there are times when I'm clicking a link from reddit to see something someone has mentioned and then later go to the same site and buy something I was planning on buying and in those cases if the original link had an affiliate code, I'm pretty sure they end up getting credit for the later purchase that they had no involvement with.
All the YT creators are making a stink about this because surprise surprise, honey was stealing from them, not their viewers.
It's one of those open secrets that most youtube-peddled services are predatory in some way, and the creators happily kept pushing them on to their viewers because money talks. Now it turns out Honey is hurting their own bottom lines, so of course they all get on their moral high horses.
I'm curious why Amazon doesn't show you in some obvious way what affiliate code your purchase is linked to, if any. I'm imagining something like the way they used to display your Amazon Smile charity if you used that option.
Perhaps they've guessed that it would shock some people to learn how often they inadvertently use affiliate links and they would be discouraged from shopping or find some way to disable the codes.
Or even better give you option to take the affiliate cut as discount. Which would be win for everyone. Affiliate spammers would get knowledge that people gave them money out of charity. Shop would sell more as things are cheaper. And buyers would get cheaper products.
Wait what? :) Are you proposing that amazon should have a “give me a discount on my purchase” check-box on their checkout page? Why would anyone not click that? And if people would click it why would anyone share affiliate links of amazon?
That would completely undermine the incentive structure of the whole structure.
> Which would be win for everyone.
Except of course the content creators. It would not be a win for them.
They would still get cut from those who choose to support them this way. Rest of the people would get discount. There seems to be plenty of people who click affiliate links so creators get money. Those same people would still give the cut to them wouldn't they?
> Those same people would still give the cut to them wouldn't they?
It is a very different proposition. In the current practice you get the product for the same price as everyone else and the creator gets a small slice of the shop's profit. In the system you are proposing where you could decide to pocket the money it would feel like you are giving the money out of your own pocket to the creator. It literally would make the product more expensive for you to purchase if you decide to not take the discount but give it to the creator. It would feel like charity with weird extra steps and a middle man.
Sure, some people would do it. I guess there are turbo-fans everywhere. But the income from affiliate links would collapse dramatically. Because if there is a button to get a discount easy then people will push the button to get the discount. They will justify it to themselves however they want it.
> Or then just ban the whole scam.
Ban as in with government force? Or ban as in the online shop decides to not engage in affiliate marketing anymore?
The first: ok? Why? I'm not that fussed about it, but I'm also not seeing why this would be a good policy. Or what exactly you want to ban for that matter.
The second: Presumably the webshops made their own calculations that they earn more money with affiliate marketing than without. I don't know how one would do that, but I assume they are not just doing it out of inertia, or goodness of their hearth.
> I'm frankly baffled it weren't more common knowledge
I think the last time I actively investigated how to save pennies with these online coupon things was the 90s when I was a teenager and I suppose that's true for more people.
1. Honey makes money through deals with retailers to not offer the best coupon code to the extension's users
2. Honey swaps out the referral code from the blog/video/etc. that actually referred you to the product with their own, even when they didn't find any coupon deal
Merely "Honey makes commissions from our merchant partners" is not at all a "very upfront" description of that behavior. Moreover, many of the people affected by this are reviewers/etc. who have never themselves used Honey so had no particular reason to look into how it works.
The two together results in honey essentially being paid instead of real affiliates to suppress coupon codes from you(since they advertise to stores that they direct users away from finding coupons, and towards a more stable discount percentage).
This is hard to grasp. Do I understand correctly that some web pages may display a coupon code for a discount on some possible future sale. And the Honey extension detects this coupon code and replaces it with a different coupon with less discount? This all seems so absurd, making money by skimming hypothetical discounts.
From what I understand, no, they don’t replace coupons you’ve entered.
Honey’s advertising message was “never search for a coupon again” and “we’ll ensure you always have the best discount possible”. However in reality a merchant could sign up as a Honey partner and for a mere 3-5% commission they’d let you set the coupons that Honey would show.
So for example if your business gave a 20% promotional coupon to a small community, you could set Honey to ignore it and only show a 5% coupon in the coupon search. People with the 20% coupon will still get to use it, but Honey will never supply it.
So not only was Honey removing affiliate revenue from the people promoting it, it wasn’t giving the people using it the best deal that it promised.
> Why would they want to pay Honey any money when Honey doesn’t originate any traffi?
Paying Honey means you can limit the discounts available through Honey, sort of like a shitty protection scheme.
Because Honey bills itself to the consumer as the be-all-end-all coupon and discount app and advertises itself as "we know ALL the coupon codes and discounts", a consumer with the Honey extension will likely not look outside of that for a discount and assume whatever they got from the extortion racket as the end customer was "the best deal".
Does Honey get the full amount from the affiliate programs? What if Honey only gets a fraction? Then the merchant might be happy to pay Honey 1/10 of the normal affiliate amount if Honey puts its own affiliate code there instead of some Youtube reviewer's affiliate code, which would earn the Youtuber the full affiliate value.
"Earning money from affiliate links" and "stealing affiliate links" are not the same thing. There is a big range of behaviors here, and they're right at the worst end of it.
I'm surprised by how far they went, not that affiliate links were involved at all.
At no point in that writeup does Honey say they use cookie stuffing to fraudulently steal affiliate attribution when no discount code is found. This is a serious crime: people have gone to prison for cookie stuffing affiliate codes (see: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdal/pr/cookie-stuffing-interne...)
> The only thing that I never understood was why brands would allow Honey to be an affiliate. Why would they want to pay Honey any money when Honey doesn’t originate any traffi?
Because Honey has leverage.
Just to provide one example, Honey can very easily hurt Amazon's bottom line by adding random affiliate codes (of independent creators) to every transaction. This wouldn't make them any money, but would bring them to the negotiating table.
Instead, Amazon can work out a deal with them where they get half the standard affiliate fee, and Amazon pockets the rest. Amazon is happy because they pay 1.5% to Honey instead of paying 3% to a different creator, Honey is happy because they get 1.5% instead of nothing, and Honey users are happy because if Honey is well-funded, they'll use some of that money on letting them find good deals online.
This is just one of the ways it could have played out; it's also possible that e.g. Honey had good access to some kind of Amazon discount codes that they kept applying too often, which Amazon didn't like, so they worked out a deal that wasn't too bad for Amazon and great for Honey.
> The only thing that I never understood was why brands would allow Honey to be an affiliate. Why would they want to pay Honey any money when Honey doesn’t originate any traffi?
One YouTube channel, theo dot gg has a conspiracy theory about it which is honey:
1. amassed a huge (rabid) user base
2. Offered "protection" to companies
The evidence presented is Amazon dot com affiliates walk on eggshells to avoid breaking Toss that Honey completely tramples on so at the very least honey is not subject to the same tos as everybody. However, Amazon dot com is very aware of honey evidenced by advisory warnings on Amazon dot com website from a few years ago.
So I think basically the strategy here was:
1. Pay a lot of money to buy a user base
2. Offer protection to stores if they do certain things
3. Deliberately don't give the best offers to users if the stores pay this protection money, wreck the store somehow(?) if they don't
4. Profit
PayPal Holdings Inc. made a big bet in November with its $4 billion acquisition of Honey, a web browser extension that helps online shoppers find the lowest prices. Now Amazon.com Inc. is warning customers not to use the tool.
Shortly before Christmas, Amazon said Honey posed a security risk, which was reported Thursday by Wired. The warning perplexed some online shopping experts since the tool has been available for several years and Amazon makes no similar warnings about other browser extensions such as price tracker camelcamelcamel.com.
Yeah, that tiny blurb was all I could find, which doesn't really tell me anything.
> The evidence presented is Amazon dot com affiliates walk on eggshells to avoid breaking Toss that Honey completely tramples on so at the very least honey is not subject to the same tos as everybody. However, Amazon dot com is very aware of honey evidenced by advisory warnings on Amazon dot com website from a few years ago.
I don't get this, if Amazon really thought that Honey was "trampling on Amazon's TOS" surely they would just ban Honeys affiliate status? If anything this implies to me that someone had a grudge.
It could also mean Amazon dot com has decided that it was not possible to kill honey and it was better to join them rather than trying to and failing to kill honey.
I think it is already proven that honey does not automatically show the best coupons for its users. So how and when does honey decide to hold back? The conspiracy theory is honey decides to hold back when there is an agreement with the vendor. Now logically, why would honey intentionally give its users a poorer experience? It makes sense to me that honey will only do so intentionally if honey is getting paid to do so.
> I think it is already proven that honey does not automatically show the best coupons for its users.
I think so, however I'm not sure how you would prove that they do this knowingly, mostly what's been proven are affiate link hijacks, because thats directly impacted sites.
And why would companies offer coupons, they then spend money not showing?
My guess to your question would be that perhaps there is the belief, or maybe data proves it factual, that when someone is considering a purchase and might be on the fence and then they see that Honey can get them a coupon or rewards points that they are then slightly more likely to go through with the purchase thinking they are getting a good deal. If data shows an increase in sales then some might consider affiliating worth it. Just my guess.
>> We earn these commissions when a member uses Honey to find available savings or to activate PayPal Rewards
Do you really think that clicking an "OK" button to dismiss a dialog after Honey doesn't find any coupons that secretly reloads the page your on and replaces the affliate cookie with its own is just "earning money from affiliate links?" That's just one of the super shady things they do.
Same with Paypal rewards. They entice users to click the rewards button to again steal the affiliate cookie, and pay them a few cents while they take tens of dollars in affiliate commision.
They literally advertise this as a feature on their home page in that they give you X% of what they earn from affiliate links. It says a lot about the influencers advertising it if they did not realise that Honey is taking their affiliate revenue while reading an ad that says they do. More realistically, most of them likely did know that this is what Honey does and determined that honey paid more than any lost revenue, but know that saying that would lead to some of this outrage being directed at them. As a bonus, by asking users to uninstall Honey they can have their money from running Honey ads previously and money from their affiliate links too. The only way I can maybe see influencers being unaware of this if if they read an ad that only talked about the coupon feature and they never bothered to even visit the Honey homepage or try it themselves, which would be a pretty bad look for them.
I also think most users that use Honey have to know that this is what it does given that, again, it's an advertised feature. I suspect most people outraged at this are people that never used the tool in the first place.
I certainly think it's a bad product as it defeats the purpose of affiliate links and reduces revenue for anyone using affiliate links for their intended purpose, but I don't think they were misleading anyone about what the product does.
If a company says they make money “selling cars” you don’t assume they get those cars through theft. Same deal here, saying they get affiliate money doesn’t imply they overwrite existing affiliate links which is about a clear a case of tortious interference as you could find. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference
So, no Honey didn’t disclose what people are complaining about.
I agree that it's likely tortious interference, I just don't agree that they're being deceptive. I think it's reasonable to say that most of the target market would be considered tech-savvy enough to know how these purchase affiliate programs work and the influencers advertising it absolutely do.
If users are not aware of how this works then I have to question where they think the cashback comes from, and if they are aware that it comes from the business they are making a purchase from then I have to question why they think the business would give a commission to Honey on top of the existing commission to wherever a link was clicked from. I think a majority of users would have to be somewhat wilfully ignorant to not question why money is being given back to them whenever they make a purchase.
I would posit that the "average user" has no care about how the companies they interact with make their money. The modern world is filled with black boxes to them.
I think you’re missing the point. Honey is stealing affiliate credits from influencers who don’t have any relationship with them.
If a YouTuber posts an link with their own affiliate code and during checkout the user uses the Honey extension to look for coupons Honey steals the affiliate credit even if they don’t have a coupon the YouTuber gets nothing.
*Even if they know there is a coupon, but are hiding it from you because of a partner relationship with the store who hasn't published any coupons to their honey admin portal.
I very much agree that it's bad in this regard and potentially even illegal, I just don't think they were ever misleading about the fact that they do this.
It took LTT years to detect this behavior despite it coming up in forums and HN. They then decided to stop accepting sponsorships from them.
Sponsored ads also often boasted Honey will get you the best deal anywhere. Yet some have found them knowingly preferring their own coupons even though others users had manually entered and successfully used better coupons from elsewhere (while the extension was installed).
> Sponsored ads also often boasted Honey will get you the best deal anywhere.
I agree that this can be called misleading, or even potentially a scam.
> It took LTT years to detect this behavior despite it coming up in forums and HN.
They're well aware of how affiliate links work, so as I said above, even if they only advertised the coupon part and never the cashback part they'd have to have never bothered to visit the Honey homepage or tried it themselves. I'm sure they just determined that they'd make more revenue than the lost affiliate revenue at first and later determined they no longer would.
Just because they know how affiliate links work, would the wording on Honeys website not lead them to believe they're only being the "affiliate" if they find a deal?
How would they have detected this without doing an investigation themselves into how the tool works, and they don't seem to be the kind of company to do that kind of due diligence when accepting ad deals.
