Honey has now lost 4M Chrome users after shady tactics were revealed
The entire business model is predicated on injecting themselves as the last click for attribution even when they weren’t remotely responsible for the conversion. Cool business, but can’t keep going on forever without someone catching on.
It's only an invasion of privacy if the monitoring is done in secret.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/final-defendant-ebay-cybe...
Perhaps it changed recently, or I just never noticed? I was expecting 100MB with back button abuse and retention dark patterns. Instead, it loads fast, has minimal guff, and the footer scrolled into view ending the page within sight of the end of the actual article.
Perhaps this is a reward response to not having to / be able to doom scroll?
Edit: Yes. In 2014. How did I miss that? Used to listen to that podcast, though probably stopped before that.
Amazon et al don't allow you to offer this as an affiliate program partner, not without a special and custom agreement at least, but if the extension was partner-agnostic and released by a party unaffiliated with Amazon in any way, there's nothing they could realistically do about it.
It'd be one way to bring Amazon Smile back, and on many more sites than just Amazon.
Also not more weird than the British charity thing of "I'm shaving off all my hair, and that's why you should donate to charity Y." (I suspect Brits need an excuse before they are mentally allowed to do something silly. But any excuse will do.)
So if you see a friend is trying to do some personal achievement, and you think the charity is a worthwhile one to donate to; why not combine the two and help your friend achieve their goal whilst also raising money for a good cause.
I've never thought about it before, but I suppose it's a way for you to provide some commitment from yourself as a condition for those you're crowdsourcing donations from.
If you don't deliver on your part, they don't have to pay.
When I was in high-school we did everything from shaving our heads, to having your legs waxed in front of the whole (boys) school.
I raised thousands of £ for charity this way, more than I could ever raise by myself at that age.
What Honey did robbed content publishers of ad revenue, advertisers lead valuations, and end consumer confidence (bait-and-switch.)
I wouldn't want to be in the blast radius of that legal mess... Popcorn ready for when the judge defines the scope of who is liable =3
There's a browser extension for that too.
Most media people have gone back to unique affiliate discount-coupon-codes instead of clickable URL parameters to track lead referrals.
Unfortunately, this also leads to sampling bias, and campaigns spelunking spam statistics. I'd guess on YT irritating people drives engagement in some twisted way. lol =3
I had this idea before Honey. When we spoke to our attorney, he instantly told us "that won't fly; you'll get popped for cookie stuffing."
The adware world had been doing similar things forever - injecting fake results into Google, taking over default home pages to show Google look-alikes.
When Honey launched on Reddit and got their first user bump, I started building our prototype. While digging deeper, you discover Honey injects JavaScript from their API, which violates extension store TOS, yet somehow this flies.
Fast forward, they hire the CEO of Commission Junction (CJ) as their CFO and everything becomes gravy.
Try to get offers via CJ, you won't get a response. All affiliate networks (CJ, Rakuten/LinkShare, etc.) have "stand down" policies in their contracts. You're supposed to detect when someone takes action like clicking a coupon site link and "stand down." Honey never did this. We had to demonstrate it was happening, but bring it up to CJ and they won't care.
It's regulatory capture of a borderline illegal business.
All cited studies came from RetailMeNot (since taken down). They claim customers abandon carts for coupons. Sure, some do, but those people will probably convert anyway.
Today, coupons are dying. We're in the world of personalized offers. Most coupon codes don't exist anymore - they're offer links. These systems try to "find you a coupon" which isn't real.
You're not supposed to share personalized coupons. These systems capture your coupons and add them to their list, but they almost never work.
I'd never try this business again. It's dishonest and terrible.
Fun fact: Much of this goes back to adware/search XML feeds from parking pages. IAC had a division called Mindspark Interactive Network (recently closed) - their adware division generating insane profit through Pay-Per-Download scam browser extensions tricking your grandfather, hijacking affiliate link clicks, same playbook.
The affiliate networks don't care as long as referrers look like they match approved pages.
This industry needs to die.
but can’t keep going on forever without someone catching on
But despite a lot of coverage they've only lost about 1/5 of their user base.
Though, like what was exposed, Honey does a poor job for the end user too. There are other cashback sites out there doing what Honey claims/does, but passes on more to the end user. Though they're all taking the referral $$ from the real referer, if there was one.
Cool business
Shameful parasitism. The engineers working on this garbage knew what they were doing. I'd question the ethics of anyone who worked on this.
but you are also missing the fact that the great part of the industry works in the same way: using open source stuff, in a super parasitic way, to track and control millions of users.
the average googler here is not better here.
p.s.: great nickname btw. and on point.
https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1jlfms8/im_ryan_hudso...
I'm not a honey user but I thought this section was interesting:
This gets a bit technical but in the video, Jonathon carefully shows you that the ‘NV_MC_LC’ cookie changes from Linus Tech Tips -> Paypal when a user engages with Honey. What he must have seen is that there is also a ‘NV_MC_FC’ cookie that stays affiliated with Linus Tech Tips and is NOT changed to Paypal. In this case LC stands for ‘last click’ and FC for ‘first click’. In the video he seems to claim that there is no first click cookie and only a last click cookie - this claim is false.In my DM conversation with Jonathon he claimed that he noticed the FC cookie but didn’t think it was relevant and that he was confused by it. I wonder, as an investigative journalist, did he think to ask anyone at NewEgg or the affiliate networks to explain it to him before he threw damning accusations at an industry he didn’t understand?
The two biggest missing pieces from both my discussion and from the video are: 1) stand down rules for affiliate, and 2) cash back to the user.
I was trying to address the claims he raised in the video specifically and since he didn't mention either I didn't in my reddit post except for a little bit in a couple of the answers.
1) For the case where the store only uses last click (which is most of them) Honey and other browser extensions follow a rule set by the affiliate networks called 'stand down'. This means they attempt to detect when another affiliate link is clicked (e.g. from a creator) and then either fully disable the functionality or at least don't use affiliate links. Only browser extensions are subject to these rules (e.g. if you visit a coupon code website they will use their affiliate link and override the creator).
Detecting this can be a bit tricky across numerous affiliate networks and I suspect the NewEgg example was selected because it used a non-standard way to manage affiliate tagging and therefore wasn't detected by Honey's stand down logic.
fwiw I agree with the sentiment that Honey shouldn't have been tagging on a 'hey we didn't find any codes' or 'use paypal' click and I personally wouldn't have approved that, though it probably technically does meet most of the affiliate network stand down rules (well, at least it did - I'm sure they've been updated which is a good thing).
2) Jonathon's video is completely silent on the other core value proposition of Honey: cash back. Honey, like Rakuten, Capital One Shopping, etc, offers cash back funded by affiliate marketing. The model is not new - Ebates (now Rakuten Rewards) was founded in 1998. Honey added this program in 2015.
When a user is shopping with Honey on a store with affiliate commission, Honey almost always gives the user cash back. There are a limited number of exceptions, generally because of the store's policy, and occasionally because there are so many exclusions to the affiliate program that it makes offering cash back confusing to a user.
A valid question to ask is: if a user clicks a creator affiliate link AND has a cash back tool like Honey or Rakuten should they or should they not be eligible for cash back. Personally I think absolutely yes, the user's preference is the most important. But I've heard reasonable people argue the opposite.
What I don't think is that offering it's users cash back makes Honey a scam and I think Jonathon was negligent in presenting this narrative without even considering this primary use case for what is actually the #1 business model in affiliate marketing.
I'll stop there. Happy to answer a few more questions here.
I don't think any of this is transparent to the user. That's the scam.
We always tried to be as transparent to our users as possible in the product, in the faq, in our customer support, etc.
You can see evidence of that approach at 6:17 in Jonathon's video in the response that he got from customer service about how Honey works (even when he intentionally removes critical context). He reads a support email that says:
If Honey is activated and is the last program used while shopping on a site, it is likely Honey will receive credit for the purchase, and Gold will be earned by the member. However, if your favorite influencer's affiliate link was the last program associated with your purchase during your shopping on the site then they will receive the credit for the purchase. Keep in...
Notably he stopped reading before the "and Gold will be earned by the member" because it didn't fit his narrative.
I know it flashed on the screen faster than anyone could read and was zoomed so you couldn't see the whole thing on one screen but would you consider this level of transparency adequate if he read the whole thing?
A valid question to ask is: if a user clicks a creator affiliate link AND has a cash back tool like Honey or Rakuten should they or should they not be eligible for cash back. Personally I think absolutely yes, the user's preference is the most important. But I've heard reasonable people argue the opposite.
I'm not very familiar with Honey, it's business model, or the ins and outs of the affiliate program back stage. My impression here is strictly as an observer with no foot in the race.
Should they be eligible for cash back? Sure, if you want to give them cash. I don't see why that entitles Honey a link in the affiliate program chain, though. The cash back offer seems entirely independent from the user's choice to at least get to the point of purchase, with maybe an occassional situation where they would have pulled out if not for a cash back or coupon deal.
It's a benefit you're affording the user, but it's on you to find a way to monetize that without impacting the actual affiliate. If you have a deal with the merchant so that doesn't affect the actual affiliate, great. If you charge your users a monthly fee or something, wonderful. But if you're deciding that you deserve a share of an existing pot, you're in the wrong, and there's no two ways about that. A flawed business model doesn't entitle you to other people's shares.
Again, I'm not familiar with the way the system works at all, and haven't seen Laing's video, so I might be missing context. But from your quote on Reddit:
On most stores Honey (and others) offer a portion of the commission back to users as cash back.
My understanding is that Honey inserts itself into the affiliate chain, takes Y% of the commission (and reducing the original affiliate's commission by the same amount? Clarification needed), then returns X% back to the user, and keeps Y% minus X% for itself. So what exactly is Honey doing here? Taking a part of the pot because it's giving some portion of the pot back to the user, while otherwise offering nothing of value to either the affiliate or the merchant? Why shouldn't the original affiliate simply be given the ability to offer the user cash back and remove Honey as the middleman? Why should the original affiliate have any loss in their own commission because of a 3rd party's actions?
If Honey's %Y commission is part of a deal you have with the retailer and doesn't affect the original affiliate's commission at all, I apologize, and understand the situation. But if there's any cost to the original affiliate here whatsoever, I don't think you have any justification for imposing that cost on them.
It is a system design flaw (that maybe will self correct because of this) that multiple advertising models at different points in the value chain are built on the same system. 'Multi-touch' or 'any-click' are the correct direction to solve this problem but introduce their own challenges for retailers which is why most of them have not adopted these systems yet.
You ask "what exactly is Honey doing here?"
Short answer is helping the retailer with conversion and limiting cart abandonment by making the user happy and more likely to transact.
It was never a secret
Their business model was never explained clearly on their website. Now that how it works has become common knowledge, its absolutely wrecked honey's public perception.
Merchants may have known what they were signing up for (if they signed up at all). But the general public had no idea.
Affiliate attribution wasn't explained in full but MegaLag with all his research still didn't accurately explain it since it's pretty complex. The user doesn't need to know this.
Doesn't make sense to explain all the nuts and bolts if it works the same way any other coupon website would.
It's not "literally doing nothing" to compile and automatically apply/suggest coupon codes. That's literally doing something. Is it valuable? Objectively, yes, hence the millions upon millions of users.
Your statement is either hyperbolic or disingenuous: the very two things people are accusing honey of doing.
So honey is undeniably aiding in the sale.
First of all, "undeniably" here is hyperbole. At best you could say "possibly, occasionally". You were already brought to site by a content creator, added the item to your cart, and are in the process of checking out. Why would a coupon code aggregator then deserve the commission for that sale?
It's not "literally doing nothing" to compile and automatically apply/suggest coupon codes.
Even when they don't find a coupon code, they still take the commission for the sale. That is quite literally the definition of getting paid for doing nothing.
Is it valuable? Objectively, yes, hence the millions upon millions of users.
Well, no. As the investigation revealed, Honey doesn't actually find any coupon code most of the time. In fact, this is intentional - they partner with retailers to limit the coupon codes they provide to shoppers. In other words they are intentionally providing negative value for the end user most of the time (when compared to searching the Web for a coupon code manually).
You clearly either know nothing about the investigation, or are a Honey employee.
They also collect and sell data about all the purchases users make. I'd be startled if PayPal didn't use this data for selling customers on Braintree or selling ads. Also triple dipping and taking money from the affiliates (besides selling user data and extorting merchants) is downright greedy.
But consider a retailer who has budget to spend with the goal of increasing sales. Here's a study one of the largest affiliate networks did on shopping extensions - https://junction.cj.com/article/cj-demystifies-shopping-brow...
It boils down to making numbers go up. Maybe for you, Honey doesn't do much. But add Honey to the picture, and retailers are seeing an increase in sales and a decrease in cart abandonment. So you choose to partner with a coupon company and pay them commission and for some percentage of users, seeing that popup pushed them over the edge to make the purchase.
In the attribution chain, when you compare an initial referral vs. the coupon app, it's fair to say that the initial referral has more impact. So maybe you want the initial referral to take most or all of the credit. But what about when there's no referral? Doesn't the coupon app deserve to be a part of the chain if it is ultimately driving positive return?
The whole system seems to be set up to reward [...] 2. customers willing to deal with a ridiculous system for a discount.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination#Coupons
It's unclear whether banning price discrimination as a whole is a good thing. Is it really a bad thing that people with more money pay more, and people with more time can get a discount?
Is it really a bad thing that people with more money pay more...?
Yes, it is. It is blatantly unfair to charge different people different prices. You can illustrate this with a thought experiment: nobody would think it's ok if I charge Joe $5, but charge Bob $10 because I don't like him very much. Price discrimination is very much the same thing, just with the mechanism obfuscated and dressed up in pretty language so that it doesn't trip people's "this isn't right" detector as easily.
Yes, it is. It is blatantly unfair to charge different people different prices. You can illustrate this with a thought experiment: nobody would think it's ok if I charge Joe $5, but charge Bob $10 because I don't like him very much.
This isn't as airtight proof of "unfair" as you think it is. Moreover this happens all the time without people being outraged. McDonalds might charge Joe $5, and Bob $10 for the same burger, because McDonalds likes Joe very much for using their app, so they send him offers.
Even if we do grant that charging people different prices is fundamentally "unfair", it leads to all sorts of strange conclusions. For instance if some retailer has some product on discount today only. Is that also "unfair"? I don't see how "buys a fridge on Wednesday rather than Thursday" is a morally justifiable reason to give different prices than say, being able to scout out a coupon or not. Should we ban time limited sales as well?
McDonalds gives people deals in their app because it tricks people into installing the app which they use to collect their customer's personal data (even when they aren't using the app) which they can sell or exploit in any way they see fit. It's a terrible deal for the customer, but they don't know any better because they don't get to see how that data is used against them.
Price discrimination leads to exploitation and enables bigotry. We've been being conditioned to accept it because ultimately companies want to abuse it to make more money at your expense. The only thing standing in their way is that most people understand that discriminatory pricing is unfair and dangerous https://link.springer.com/article/10.1057/s41272-019-00224-3
nobody would think it's ok if I charge Joe $5, but charge Bob $10 because I don't like him very much
Are you sure? People often cheer on this kind of thing if they also think Bob's an asshole. (And there's no rule against it in most places unless you don't like Bob for fairly specific reasons)
The whole system seems to be set up to reward [...] customers willing to deal with a ridiculous system for a discount.
That's not all of what coupons are for.
They're also a form of advertising. If you give them out to an influencer in your niche who can bring you great customers, you can make a lot of extra profits.
Imagine you're making an app for managing hair dressing salons. If there's a particular Youtuber popular among hair dressing salon managers, you can do a deal with them where their viewers get 20% off on the first year of their subscription to your app, and the influencer gets an extra 3% of that revenue.
You do this because you expect that people watching that channel are already hair dressing salon managers, and hence are very likely to become big spenders with your company once they start using your services. It's a great deal for everyone.
Honey turns that on its head by indiscriminately offering that influencer's valuable voucher code to everyone, reglardless of whether they've seen any of their videos.
But not everyone is equally fortunate, and for some people the time investment to find the right coupon might be what makes them able to afford a necessity.
Retailers should charge a single transparent price without having everyone have to go trawling around the Internet for coupon codes which may or may not work.
Then you miss the point of the coupon codes, they're for measuring ad effectiveness. The discount is the incentive for the customer to reveal to the business where they learned about the product and who was responsible for the sale.
E.G. if the retailer normally pays at 300 bps to their affiliates for a particular transaction, Honey may only get 100 or 50 bps.
It's a choice between e.g. Honey giving every customer of vendor X a voucher code from a particularly valuable influencer in X's niche, which gives 30% off on first orders, versus giving them a 20% discount and taking 1.5% for itself.
This is a great deal for the retailer, they go from -30% to -21.5%, it's a great deal for Honey because that kind of money on millions of transaction is a lot of money, and it's a great deal for users, as Honey wouldn't even exist without this scheme, and they'd get 0% off instead of 20.
They're not guiding the user to shop a or shop b, they're
- redirecting the attribution away from the actual affiliate (could hurt shops because their affiliates become unhappy and advertise their competitors)
- automatically applying coupons that decrease the shop's margin.
How are they "great business partners"?
In terms of being "great business partners". The affiliate space like other industries requires a team of people on the retailer side and Honey's side talking to each other and establishing a relationship. Here is a random article I just Google'd that sheds a bit of light about that relationship. https://www.advertisepurple.com/affiliate-spotlight-a-conver...
Influence can be bought on the cheap. MrBeast says use Honey, you use Honey. Are you going to not partner with the business that is smart enough to partner with MrBeast?
You could probably be clever and come up with a more complicated discount scheme that's not so easy for Honey to take advantage of, but that adds complexity for users as well.
Shit system, shit value for the client, and still it looks like some people would kill for a 5% one-time discount on anything.
I think for some it taps into the same reward neurons as winning £10 on a lottery after paying £1 in week-in-week-out for years. It feels like a win, and that for many overrides any desire to properly analyse the matter (did I actually save, with the coupon, or save 5% on something that has been marked up 20%? (or buy something I didn't really want at all?!)). Same with BlackFriday, many of Amazon's “prime day” offers, and so forth.
[Also not American, I'm a UKian/ex-EUian, it is not uncommon to see the same here, just not in the big way some Americans tend to go with almost anything]
This is what happened when Ron Johnson tried to rebrand JC Penny. JC Penny customers were used to "deals" through coupons. He changed the pricing so the prices were lower, across everything, all the time. The classic JC Penny customer hated this. They ultimately pay the same amount, it would be less work for them, but it wasn't a "deal".
Amazon plays on this too with the crossed out inflated "typical price", and then showing the actual price you'll pay. No one ever pays that crossed out price; it can say anything, but lets them put "-40%" so people get excited and buy.
It's all very manipulative. Honey was just another form of the same concept.
Honey gets additional ire, for what they did beyond that. Coupons are manipulative, but Honey was also lying to pretty much everyone involved in the transactions, as well as their advertising partners.
Yes, many retailers are struggling. Perhaps affiliate links and cash back are not the best way, but it's not the only way that retailers try to be successful.
If you were a suit working at a retailer with budget to spend with the goal of getting a return on investment, maybe you would personally avoid spending the money on affiliate links. But get this, the TOP, BIG, SUCCESSFUL retailers all have data showing that the affiliate system makes the numbers go up. Even if they don't understand the system, they just care about the numbers.
Lknk to the AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/s/lEGdq1Sx9d
The only metric business people care about is whether the lead converts into sales. People often don't want to think about how the hotdog was made at the factory. =3
If it seems to good to be true, it probably is.
I gave the 'product' to friends and some of them told me "oh, you should do it like ground.news where I can see left, center, right". This idea turns me off so much. Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee. Just give me the information that's there in most sources and it's probably be going to be close to some objective overview of the situation.
Ground news tells you the bias of publications that have published the news item not the slant of the news item itself. It lets you see how much news gets completely ignored by the right and left (the right is way worse) when it isn't favorable to their cause. It's also really interesting to sample both sides and see how wildly the facts get slanted as you get further from center.
The publishers are biased, not the news item.
Honestly your paranthesis that "the right is way worse" is already too political for my taste. It makes me feel dumb for even writing this reply. Alas, these are my thoughts. News should be news. What happened and when. Not some attack vector against a group of people or another.
Honestly your paranthesis that "the right is way worse" is already too political for my taste.
They're not wrong, though.
What happened and when.
"What" is often a matter of definition and framing, especially if you also want news to include "to what effect" which is not always black-and-white. "Why" is an answer that also must be answered, but will often come through a political lens. News cannot be free from a political lens if "why" and "to what effect" are considered, and probably can't be free from some element of a political lens even if just sticking to "what".
Any issue I’m deeply familiar with that gets reported is almost always missing lots of meaningful information. There isn’t really competition for most news, so there’s no incentive to follow up.
Publishers have biases, and their sources have agendas.
Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee.
Because at the day information can be political.
the information that's there in most sources
While I don't use ground news myself, aggregators and classifiers like them can show you when and where stories are being published in very lopsided manners. When a story is only really being published by one side you can use that as another bit of information.
Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee.Because at the day information can be political.
Umm. Yes. Which is precisely what placing it left / center / right amplifies.
the information that's there in most sourcesWhile I don't use ground news myself, aggregators and classifiers like them can show you when and where stories are being published in very lopsided manners. When a story is only really being published by one side you can use that as another bit of information.
Sure, it's another bit of information. I think more important are the facts. Did this actually happen? If so, what happened? The tl;dr of what happened should give me a pretty good idea, without having to become a reporter myself, especially if covered by both sides.
I think this is more of an issue of an union, than the 'argument to moderation' or 'false balance' might appeal to. If I'm left, and report or something and you don't. That's probably high noise. If you're right and report to something I don't. That's probably high noise. If we both report on something, and we report differently on 80% but we have the same 20%. I'd say that 20% is high signal.
What if we cut out the left / center / right ideas and just take as many sources as we can? Then extract what's common between them. Wouldn't that have some sort of higher signal to noise ratio than any single viewpoint?
Of course, I'm willing to accept I'm wrong. From my personal experience so far, I'm much less inclined to extremes than I was since starting to use this system.
I hope it's just an "good" product that will (like every SaaS) be plagued by enshittification 5 years down the line.
Either case, it's hopefully a silver lining to my dads "don't trust MSM" tendencies. (fortunately he's too academic to go full conspiracy crazy but you never know)
I never saw a single sponsorship for Honey, but I see a ton for Kiwico and Ground News. I can't speak for Ground News, but Kiwico is a sponsor of basically every educational YouTube channel, and it's actually just that good and totally worth it for kids of the right age.
Given how many parrot exactly the same story, practically word for word, about how they personally find it so useful, is a useful barometer of whether I should trust any recommendation from those channels. It was called astroturfing in my day, I don't consider it any more trustworthy in its new name “influencing”.
I wonder if there is some catch
Ground News is a startup that had 3 rounds of funding it total. If it sees significant uptake, it will become a juicy acquisition target for any influence-peddlers you can imagine, in addition to the usual data collection and ad-monetization risks.
Their segmentation of news organizations according to bias, can be obviously be biased itself. That's not a problem necessarily, but the service promotes itself as neutral while it's VC funded. You are part of a demographic that will be propagandized in the future to recoup costs.
because I can’t imagine that many people sign up for the paid service. I
It's new media, and in the grand scheme of things, youtuber sponsorships are dirt cheap compared to traditional means.
The news model is well established by this point of ads + no-ad premium subscrition, so I don't think there's many potential dark arts here. It also feel everpresent simply because they are smartly targeting youtubers covering politics. And US politics is a burning hot topic right now.
I think a lot of these YouTubers are pretending to be shocked or caught out.
Anyone who flogs ball shavers, ass wipes or fuckin microwave dinners don't give a shit about their viewers, and only care about their bottom lines and will shill whatever they can for the right price.
Anyone who flogs ball shavers, ass wipes or fuckin microwave dinners don't give a shit about their viewers
I mean what’s wrong with selling ball shavers, ass wipes, and fuckin’ microwave dinners? These aren’t really harmful things and they provide actual value to people.
Are you just opposed to advertising as a concept?
Those can actually be harmful things, and a LOT of media producers will advertise them as being the best thing since sliced bread (Usually having personal endorsements required in the copy).
I personally don't mind creators advertising VPNs, but just be honest about it. Don't pretend like it's your favourite VPN you've always used, and it's the bestest, most secure, will make you super safe..
If they'd say like, I've been paid to advertise xyz VPN, I've tried it for a few days, works as advertised. I can watch my US Netflex while traveling out of the US, or whatever. But keep in mind, instead of just your ISP knowing where you browse, now the VPN providers knows, and is probably selling your data. Like, cut the bs.
Fortunately none of the youtubers I watched ever went full dark horse and pawned off gambling and scams, though. Closest to a scam was probably those "become a lord" sites that let you "buy a small plot of land in Ireland" or something and a tree gets planted. When the reality is you don't actually own the land through technicalities and it's questionable if the tree is even planted.
What's wrong with VPNs? Seems like the tamest thing to sell in terms of ethical impact.
Well, for starters the actual "security" that is often promised from these services is WAY overblown. You are already very secure browsing the internet using https. The TLS standard grants a huge amount of security that doesn't allow for snooping from a MITM.
So, when they start saying "everyone needs to do this to be safe". That's simply a boldface lie.
Your security when going through a VPN is from using https. If you are unfortunate and get a less than scrupulous VPN you might end up with them adding themselves as CAs (yes, some VPNs do that). That allows them to crack and access data within the secure stream.
Most of these VPN services are also trying to get you to do DNS with their DNS servers. Again, a major potential privacy leak problem.
That's what a security app needs to properly protect you
VPNs aren't anti-virus software and any VPN selling that should be EXTREMELY mistrusted. You are right, they can only provide that sort of service by decrypting your secure payloads. That is where all the scamminess comes into play.
Certainly not every VPN service is bad, but I'd have an inherent mistrust in one that has both a cheap fee and the seemingly endless budget to advertise everywhere on youtube. They are getting money from somewhere and I doubt it's from grandmas signing up for the service.
Most of these VPN services are also trying to get you to do DNS with their DNS servers. Again, a major potential privacy leak problem.
The privacy problem is most people using Google's DNS servers in the first place. A VPN is unlikely to keep your browsing history out of Google's hands when you're sending them a record of every domain you visit, when, and how often.
A VPN service is basically saying "Trust us more than you trust Google/your ISP" and that by necessity means giving them your DNS traffic as well.
I'd have an inherent mistrust in one that has both a cheap fee and the seemingly endless budget to advertise everywhere on youtube. They are getting money from somewhere and I doubt it's from grandmas signing up for the service.
They make a lot of their money from file sharers (some of which are also grandmas). The VPN will keep your ISP off your back and the MPA/RIAA at bay. I assume most VPNs like that are being monitored (if not outright operated) by the NSA or some other three letter agency. It's fine if you're just using the VPN for regular browsing or to torrent TV shows though because they're not going to spoil their honeypot over something so trivial and the VPN's success at keeping pirates safe builds their reputation as a secure service.
VPNs aren't anti-virus software and any VPN selling that should be EXTREMELY mistrusted.
My impression is that it makes browsing wifi networks you don't trust safer. I just let it happen, but I have a few friends who really hate having to connect to any public wifi. That seems to track with how most of the marketing goes when it's focused more on interceptions while traveling instead of on your home network. (And yes. I'm aware this is more equivalent to adding a door lock when a competent hacker has a crowbar and a window right next to it. Sometimes it's about preventing the incompetent ones).
I didn't mean to liken it to ant-virus per se. But the concepts are the same. Anything you choose that needs elevated permissions better be something you go through a fine-toothed comb with and have a stellar reputation. But without naming names, it seems a bit overly alarmist to name all VPNs that dare advertise as scams.
They are getting money from somewhere and I doubt it's from grandmas signing up for the service.
it may very well be that. It's the same old subscription service virtually every company in the world does. "sign on for this super cheap fee!". Then you keep it around and then normal ratea happen after X months. Then you just keep using it or even forget about it and that's easy steady revenue.
It's dishonest, but in an apathetic sort of way. Not a malicious one. The solution is simply for a consumer to actually watch their banking statements.
My impression is that it makes browsing wifi networks you don't trust safer.
That's why it's problematic. Using a known-good VPN can make it safer.
However by installing some VPN software you are intentionally installing a man in the middle which you now have to trust is legit.
And the promotions tend to vastly exaggerate the risk, something NordVPN got slapped for[1].
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2019/05/01/nordvpn_tv_ad_rapped_...
What's wrong with VPNs?
Nothing is inherently wrong but I trust my ISP a lot more than some random guys in Switzerland or Israel or whatever tax haven islands they operate from. They lie about what they’re good for which is just hiding things from my ISP. The rest of the benefits are fake
Because a secret you should know about your ISPs is they really don't care (or want to care) about what you are doing with their service. They don't want to add the hardware/software it'd take to spy on your data, that's a huge cost to them with nothing but downsides.
I might distrust a large ISP more just because they have the extra cache to burn. But a smaller more regional ISP will not try and invade your privacy.
Nothing is inherently wrong but I trust my ISP a lot more than some random guys in Switzerland or Israel
In the US ISPs collect, monitor, and sell your browsing history. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/how-i...
tech tubers were only really upset that Honey was stealing from /them/
But wasn't Honey paying them?
But wasn't Honey paying them?
Yes, but Honey was also stealing from them. Most youtubers make a significant portion of their income via affiliate links.
So, consider the following scenario. I made up these numbers, I don't know if these are accurate:
Honey pays a youtuber $1k for a single ad spot. Due to that ad, many of the youtuber's audience installs the Honey extension. Afterwards, the youtuber's affiliate link income goes down by $2k/month, because all of those affiliate referrals are being stolen by Honey.
Also, Honey never disclosed that they were doing this.
So, of course, you can understand why the youtubers would have grievance. Pretty much nobody would ever agree to give up $2k/month of income forever to get $1k right now. (And it's probably not right now, it's probably more like 90 days when they settle their payables).
MegaLag posted a VPN example, which was an edge case, but it was enough to spark outrage. Ironically, there are many YouTubers who have only Amazon affiliate links which Honey never touches.
Many YouTubers that Honey sponsored also didn't have conflicting affiliate links at the time of promotion.
Also, if you work with affiliate links, you should probably know how they work. IMO it'd be condescending if Honey tried to explain to every YouTuber how last click attribution worked.
I always thought Youtubers made the bulk of their money with brand deals (like Honey), and some from youtube ads + light sprinkling on top from afill links.
Maybe I'm not the typical user.
I guess for creators with a much smaller merch business, affiliate links would be twice as big a portion.
As well as just some general sentiments you see from browsing here:
- Strongly anti-copyright and seem fine completely abolishing the idea. One that would remove regulations when it comes to selliing ideas.
- Often defends the idea of private marketplaces and their cuts on developers. Which seems odd on the surface. but it makes sense when you consider it is easier to minmax for one monoplistic storefront than develop endpoints to support multiple stores. Why disrupt something you make steady income from as is?
- There's definietly underlying sentiments towards in work-related topics that come from those leading/managing companies. a stronger skew towards employee productivity and a need to aggressively weed out "low performers". A slight skew supporting business decisions like mass layoffs, even suggesting those laid off were low performers or otherwise just freeloading.
little things you catch here and there as you browse a community for years.
It was honestly surprising when one of my subcibed creators (around 400k subs on Youtube) talked a bit about financials and that half their revenue came from sponsors. And this was one who avoids all the typical ads. I imagine the numbers to sell out to yet another RAID ad must easily double that.
So these tech tubers were only really upset that Honey was stealing from /them/, they don't give a fuck about their viewers.
Ironically, this is the reason LinusTechTips never did an expose video on this back when they originally learned about Honey doing this years ago - they thought "this only affects us, if we do a video on it the viewers will be like - who cares about your bottom line?"
And now on the contrary, LTT viewers are FURIOUS that they didn't expose it and flaming them in the comments of every tangentially related video...
If it's not obvious how a company is making money, and they don't explain it somewhere... I'm not interested.
An honest extension could have still made piles of cash. They did not need to be so aggressive about taking affiliate revenue and they definitely did not need to lie about coupons.
This was not a "too good to be true" situation.
Everything else seemed... minor and expected. That was the one that surprised me.
But promoting products which have such a high likelihood of being shady like this...
Another one was the app or similar where you scanned your receipts and got some discounts or whatever. Obviously they only make money by selling your data, but they mention none of that during the promotion, just how easily you can save some bucks.
I suppose post pay that they dug into darker arts, sadly.
The remaining parts have never been released. In January, MegaLag tweeted to explain what's been going on: https://x.com/MegaLagOfficial/status/1884576211554201671
I set up a specific junk email address for this purpose and give to every retailer I shop with for their initial x% discount, and I receive coupon codes going forward.
From what I can tell, this is the best way to get discounts. Retailers are generous with people they know a lot about. The flip side is that you're going to be a target for their tricks. If you click on a link or add something to your cart, they are going to send you reminders and even more discounts to get you to buy that item.
Personally, I've been happy with this setup. I only see the promo spam when I want to. And my email becomes a personalized coupon code search engine that contains much better deals than you could get by using retailmenot or similar sites.
I set that up on an older web host and got referral credits for a few years :)
We track sales from retailers, and use historic sales information to recommend if the sale is good or not (ex some retailers always have XX% off, so you only want to jump on sales that are better than that). In addition, we'll let you sign up for digest alerts, so ideally you get 1 notification a day with all the good sales across all the brands you shop at, rather than hundreds of spammy marketing emails a day.
We don't clickjack affiliate links like Honey, and don't have deals with retailers incentivizing us to promote deals that are worse for the consumer.
Check us out at https://getketch.ai, or start browsing brands at https://members.getketch.ai/brands to get a feel for the product if you're interested
T-shirts and vacuums aren't perishable. Make everything cheaper all the time, adjust the cost to reflect actual supply/demand, and stop the wiggling banners and big signs and calculations every time I want to buy anything.
It's like an app for finding out the minimum you have to tip for a waitress to be able to survive. Maybe that's not the solution.
But I'm also just a grouch these days...
Make everything cheaper all the time, adjust the cost to reflect actual supply/demand, and stop the wiggling banners and big signs and calculations every time I want to buy anything.
Ahh, so you're JC Penney:
https://www.choicehacking.com/2022/11/24/the-psychological-f...
sadly, in some ways engaged customers want to feel like their efforts pay off in "smarter" deals. and that mind game overcomes any genuine attempts to lay everything up front.
Honestly, there's no good answer here because most of the work is manual, not automated, and there are a lot of opportunities for bad actors. It's just a bad model in general.
You can and IMHO actually should blame them for promoting crap. No sympathies on my part towards promoters of Honey, to be honest. Especially the so called "tech" channels. But this time they've tasted their own medicine.
BTW., here's a very interesting comment about the issue with regards to LTT: https://old.reddit.com/r/LinusTechTips/comments/1hkbtlr/peop... .
Their marketing claimed that Honey automatically applied coupon codes for various online retailers during the checkout phase. Nobody really had a problem with this.
What got found out and landed Honey in hot water, is the affiliate link hijacking behavior which they did not disclose. Basically, any time you follow an affiliate link with Honey installed, it replaces the original affiliate code with their own. Leading to this flow:
1. YouTuber takes Honey Sponsorship and their followers install Honey.
2. YouTuber posts new content, with affiliate links for equipment or parts.
3. YouTuber sees their affiliate links aren't getting near the amount of traffic they used to despite their videos performing just as well as before.
Remember: before MegaLeg's video the only thing that was known was the affiliate code ripping, and it was only known by a handful of YouTubers warning each other in private.
My personal opinion is that they should have sounded the alarm, even though the only people getting scammed were creators, because it was a broader attack on the whole YouTube ecosystem and not just LTT. Hell, there's even precedent for LTT making self-interested YouTube videos; remember when their Amazon affiliate account got shut down and they had to beg Dread Pirate Bezos to be reinstated? YouTube creators that are pushing people to products and services should be willing and able to completely trash those services if they turn out to be shit - or, at the very least, are being shit to them.
Even something basic like exposing how much these sponsors pay out in commission instead of towards the quality of their products would be hugely negative publicity.
wasn’t this completely unknown at the time
I would have thought was obvious from the beginning that Honey was making some of its money from affiliate programs; affiliate programs are the standard thing that "shopping" extensions use to make money, leaving aside the much shadier things that even more malicious extensions do (see the various articles on the offers extension authors receive).
I'd always assumed the people promoting it made more money from the sponsorship than they lost from lost affiliate links. The recent discussions suggest that's not the case.
It was something a youtuber I was subscribed to was talking about in how he was still seeing his affiliate numbers drop overthe last year or so, and it was actually putting his existing deals in danger. Then as a test after the expose, he asked a few family members who did use his links if they also installed Honey. He definitely never advertised Honey himself.
While everybody hates display ads, at least they are clearly ads, and aren't usually mistaken for authentic content. Affiliate marketing on the other hand...well that's the entire point! Trick people into thinking the creator has independently recommended a product because it's good, and not because they're getting paid. The content is the ad.
Affiliate marketing is evolving into a giant Tax on the entire internet economy.
To give you an example, in highly competitive software markets (VPNs, CRMs, Project Management, Email tools, Help Desk Software, etc) affiliate payouts reach as high as 50% of recurring revenue in perpetuity.
What do you think that software would cost if it wasn't paying out 50% of revenue (not profit) to influencers and reviewers to push it on unsuspecting people?
On any list of "The Best [thing] for [purpose]" appearing on Search or Youtube, it's smart to just assume it's a descending rank order of the products that offer the highest affiliate payouts. Often with the creator twisting themselves into a psychological pretzel to pretend like their "opinion" wasn't strongly influenced by the $$$.
I suppose the ideal solution is a form of search engine that is basically magical and truly personalized. So that I could search for "most comfortable gym shorts" and the top result would be the world's most comfortable gym shorts (for my physique specifically). And if I searched for just "gym shorts", I'd be shown results in my price point which optimize for different things I care about (comfort, durability, etc).
We got part way there with Amazon, but fake reviews and drop-shipping and counterfeits messed that up as well.
Maybe LLMs can help us out with this is a bit, but I'm skeptical given how quickly profit-motive manages to get in the way of UX.
down from its peak of 20 million.
people who don't realize it's still installed but also don't interact with the extension at all.
This is still making Honey money through the hijacking of affiliate links.
This extorts online businesses and steals from content creators. There is no good in this tool whatsoever.
It probably tracks consumers on top of all their other shitty behavior.
PayPal Honey extension has again "featured" flag in Chrome web store - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43298054 - March 2025 (177 comments)
LegalEagle is suing Honey [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42581108 - Jan 2025 (10 comments)
uBlock Origin GPL code being stolen by team behind Honey browser extension - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42576443 - Jan 2025 (444 comments)
Show HN: Open-source and transparent alternative to Honey - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42535274 - Dec 2024 (10 comments)
Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42483500 - Dec 2024 (86 comments)
Amazon says browser extension Honey is a security risk, now that PayPal owns it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016031 - Jan 2020 (6 comments)