How Honey Got Away With It
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- Опубліковано 16 січ 2025
- The Honey disaster is...rough. I had thoughts and wanted to break down some of the inner workings, as well as giving my own conspiratorial take
SOURCES
• Exposing the Honey Inf...
Ty Ph4seon3 for the edit!
Before you uninstall Honey make sure to leave a bad review. Chrome store won’t let you review an extension that isn’t installed. So leave review, then uninstall. Spread the word.
Also report the extension! I just reported it on both Chrome and Firefox stores.
Nah, doesn’t bother me that their extension rips off content creators who shill for scam products.
They don’t care when we get scammed by what they promote.
Google app reviews are so broken, I wouldn't be surprised if within 3 weeks or a few months time the app is sitting at 5 stars again inconspicuously. Just look at UA-cam Music... This is especially true if Google has financial interest in it.
agree
I might do that on a VM,. because at this point, I'd not put them past malware...
Honey never gave me a single deal so I removed it and went back to searching the old fashioned way.
yes same here, I used it some 3 years ago and then figured wait you always keep trying coupons and they never happen to work so I removed it. I'm in shambles right now after discovering what I've been into
I only got 1 and then chased the dragon since.😂
And it was always sketch as heck
The one time I tried out Honey, I tried it on a site that I knew had coupon codes (Play-Asia) but it found nothing so I just uninstalled it right away.
@@collinslagat3458great underrated reference
I’m really surprised that the traditional media hasn’t picked up on this. This is huge and it’s almost radio silence
yeah I was thinking the same thing... very strange
Traditional media doesn't understand what is this case about, is not interested in learning it and absolutelly is not interested in explaing to their viewers.
Honey advertises with traditional media
"trAdITIoNAL meDIa" 🤡 go touch the grass
They will, there's just a lag when the technical aspects of news, require them to get up to speed. Then again, their advertising isn't predominantly affiliate links, so they pursue the news that they feel matters most to their audience.
Someone pointed out in a video about legal action that stealing affiliate links also erases the tracking the sponsor does to see how effective a creator is in generating sales. So they could terminate a sponsorship or offer worse contracts by thinking a creator has under performed due to Honey poaching the sales. This is worse than just the direct revenue loss cos it also affects the ability to generate or maintain sponsorships as well.
Well, here's hoping Legal Eagle's class action lawsuit wins.
Betting Honey is more than happy to sell the data on this to the same merchant whose affiliate links are getting wiped. So the brand can play both sides if they want: pretend that they don't know where attribution is coming from because Honey is erasing it, and know exactly how much traffic from each real affiliate Honey is poaching so their attribution numbers are fine for deciding whether to keep dangling the affiliate carrot for an influencer.
Regardless, Honey is obviously playing by a different set of rules for brands where Honey has an affiliate relationship.
Thing is, Honey has relationships with a lot of affiliate companies [e.g. Impact, Commission Junction/CJ Affiliates, ShareASale]. So, affiliates are taking it in both ends.
I remember listening to the misfits podcast, they used to have both honey and manscaped sponsorships, but in one of their episodes, they talked about how "not a single person" used their affiliate links for manscaped, now im wondering if Honey was just taking all of them
@@connorhawkins315 : "now im wondering if Honey was just taking all of them"
Likely.
The worst part is that they were stealing affiliate tags indiscriminately - if a creator promoted Honey they at least got a little bit of a kick-back from the sponsorship even if they stole their affiliate tag. However, Honey stole affiliates from everybody, including people who were actively campaigning against Honey's behavior. That's a borderline malware behavior, should be banned altogether...
I doubt it. All the big channels pushed Honey and competing extensions and the rest generally shill for some other scam.
The really small channels might have lost a little but they’re not making much anyhow and a lot don’t even use affiliate links.
The people who lost the most here were the big channels who shilled for Honey and they deserve what they got
@@JohnSmith-op7lsso you are really arguing that stealing is okay? 😂 What is wrong with you?
@@JohnSmith-op7ls Are you a 14 year old? And wtf are you talking about? "The really small channels might have lost a little but they’re not making much anyhow and a lot don’t even use affiliate links.".
The lost revenue will be proportional to the size. Your post seems entirely designed as an excuse to have a dig at big channels. Why the fuck do big channels deserve to lose their revenue?
You know big channels are businesses with employees right?
@@JohnSmith-op7lsyou doubt what? Honey literally overrides all affiliate codes. Sure it may not be big money, but the kind of creators who weren't shilling for honey aren't making big money to begin with. And it's a fact that if honey is not sponsoring your channel, then any money they steal from you is a total loss and is not offset by payment for promoting them.
What are you doubting?
@@JohnSmith-op7ls No. ALL the small channels (and even the medium and large channels) lost out on ALL their affiliate revenue. Maybe the nominal number is low because the small channels have low outreach, but that small payment is still majorly important for a growing channel.
Easy to see what the deal is with Amazon: Honey "only" gets 1 or 2 percent, instead of the 3 percent the original referrer would have gotten.
Thats logical! Could well be what's happening
Or they have a deal where Honey offers less real codes, meaning Amazon doesn't give such big discounts and thus earn more.
It would track with the rest of honey's business model, skim 2% off this side, let someone else get 1%, skim another 1.5% from over here, give someone else .5% during that so they're not motivated to blow the whistle.
and possibly give access to their data that they harvest
Maybe only 1-2 % from the purged sales, and 0 % from other sales. That would still be a big win for Honey AND Amazon.
I believe everyone that hasn't already, should go watch Megalag's video, then come here and watch this one for additional context.
Good breakdown from Megalag. And a great follow up from you. Thanks for this.
And there's more. I just checked their privacy policy. Turns out they're processing sensitive medical information or European users without getting the necessary explicit approval from the user, too. That's one kind of information you can't hide away in some "oh, btw" section of a privacy statement...
honey not only steals money through financially transparent fraud,
but also pockets people's sensitive info?
honey gets worse and worse the more layers you peel back.
Here's a thing that hit me during the Megalag video that wasn't mentioned there, but that you've hinted at. The point of sponsorships is that you hope to receive more in revenue than the sponsorship cost. The implication of this is that Honey were paying creators in the hope of abstracting more in hijacked affiliate fees from those same creators than they paid for the sponsorship. In other words, if you're an creator using affiliate links, Honey you to agree to a deal to let them steal more of your money than they pay you. They're basically selling you a nickel for a dime.
Well no not quite, because they also get to hijack the affiliate links for every other creator that doesn’t have deals with them. These are the ones most hurt, the creators that saw no money from honey, yet were/are unknowingly having money taken from them by honey
@@chrisjsewell totaly, its actually more "tragedy of the commons" or "the prisoner's dilema".
This is a great point. The sponsorship isn't cheap. Honey was making tons of money. Probably spread across many many users and stuff but still.
@@karapuzo1 Yup. Straight up mafia tactics. Pay us to not break your kneecaps.
Like all promising ideas in i.t, Honey become a corrupt shell of its original idea, what was purposely made worse on purpose.... I can't wait for Chat GPT's 'free version' to be dumbed down and become riddled with Native advertisement (Sponsored By Dominos)
As your point with stealing data being less sketchy than this, anytime something is "free" I just automatically assume it's stealing my data in some way shape or form.
And virtually anything being heavily promoted by influencers is also sketchy.
Not to mention that if I pay for UA-cam premium, why the fuck should I be forced to watch in-video ads?
There are many things that are free that aren't evil. Open source software is generally safe, and people can see exactly what it does because it's open source. The red flag was that they spent a lot of money on advertising. And that paypal bought them for $4 billion.
@@ericmollison2760 just curious, how does one know the open source code shown is exactly the one that's being turned into the binary of the program users actually install??
I just assume everything online is tracking me/stealing data. The phone itself is always listening so why not anything else
No, stealing user data is far worse than taking a bit of money from YTers who push scam products onto their viewers
The affinity situation brings another dimension into this. You were basically being made an unwilling accessory to affiliate fraud.
Doing zero due diligence doesn’t equate to being unwilling
@@JohnSmith-op7ls He did literally nothing wrong lol. He worked with a company whose product he appreciates to get an affiliate link. One of his viewers submitted that link to honey, and honey ran with it. He wasn't even involved with honey, nor was the Affinity developers. They just caught up in the mess cos a viewer had the extension, used the code, and honey then took it and applied it for everyone else.
@@JohnSmith-op7ls i dont think he ever had a honey sponsor, the issue was just that one of the millions of people using it put the code into the extension's database so it started to be used by the userbase automatically. no due diligence could have prevented that.
@ Not being incompetent about how to set up your ecom platform when it comes to discount codes would have prevented that.
This is basic stuff
@@JohnSmith-op7lswill you chill? Did you miss the part where he refused to accept the comissions and told Affinity to shut down the code? "0 due diligence..."
I guess he should have also done a pro bono security reconstruction to their entire website to agree to a sponsorship. They are now putting up security because he told them to. Not everyone in the world is Honey's accomplice, sheesh.
I'm so stupid I just realized Honey is short for honey pot.
Im surprised that honey is even allowed on firefox's addon store. It seems like it violates addon policies to me.
I'm not sure Mozilla was aware of the BS they're pulling
Firefox now isnt the Firefox we used to know.
ye but im not surprised that its on the chrome web store...
bc chrome fucking sucks man especially the extension system
i'm not a huge fan of what firefox's been doing recently, but still chrome is bad
chro
mium
That's why i HATED WITH PASSION that browsers started hiding full urls. This is Exactly what was bound to happen.
the ref link switcheroo can also be a background refresh that is impossible to notice (and it often is)
@yeetyeet7070 javascript was a mistake
Yep. You wouldn't have even noticed a change in the URL
Browsers do that?
??? honey did not change the url. they changed a cookie value.
I don't know how many people don't know this but the affiliate links apply to anything you buy after you have applied that link, not just the item that was originally linked. In fact, you don't have to buy the originally linked item at all for the affiliate link to be applied.
Correct, until the cookie expires. I believe there's a strict 30-day maximum in most browsers now and Google is doing more cookie security changes next year.
The coupon and affiliated game has been doing this since mid 1990s. They replace referral links with their own.
Now that I know this, I'll be sure to use a creators link first before buying all the stuff I need.
@@FateDelamorte I think it'd be cool to have an extension that reminds you and let's you choose from a user defined list
@@daze8410that seems basically like the story he told at 7:30
honey never passed the basic sniff test of how are they making money, so i just assumed it was some kind of malware or data stealing ploy. but it also didn’t pass the functional snif test of how are they getting their coupons.
same.
same, unfortunately most people don't think about that. and no one can be bothered to think about it for everything. that's why Honey is this prolific and alive.
I always assumed they negotiated some rate with platforms that gave them a small cut because they demonstrably improved profit despite the losses to the coupons and what they're paying to Honey. It turns out they just straight up steal the referral and lie about not finding the coupons.
Sure it does. It inserts coupon codes that get them commissions.
This is standard affiliate program stuff.
How do they get the codes? Affiliate programs generally issue lists of them to their affiliates.
The issue here isn’t any of that, it’s that they were replacing affiliate IDs from others with their own; which isn’t a new thing.
The extension has a submit function, it's literally shown in the MegaLag video as a precursor to the section about the business partner programs.
This is how I thought it worked and basically all it did in the early days, before I saw it throwing around sponsorship money all around & getting bought by PayPal for *4B!!!* which transformed it from _"this is a neat project"_ to "oh f### what are they doing" which coincidentally is when it stopped giving away good codes most of the time.
I think that an even stronger point of leverage they could use against any merchant that doesn’t want to work with them is a pop-up of “hey we found cheaper prices at [some competitor].”
Please do not give them ideas like this 😮
What they actually did in this scenario was even nastier.
One of the features they offer to merchant partners is to restrict certain coupons (even ANY coupons) from popping up, so they could give high discount codes to select people without those codes going out to the masses.
For people who reject the service, however, they would actually did up the biggest coupon they could find (including ones obviously not meant to be public, if they could find them) and promote the hell out of them.
So non-partners were losing thousands on these private codes that Honey managed to find in retaliation for not signing up with their service.
It's freaking mafia shakedown strategies.
@@jeffwells641 I mean 50% is broken e-commerce implementations that attempted security by obscurity (e.g. no way to easily bind discount codes to a particular account) and are getting exploited by the first scummy company to try the most obvious exploits. Also a lot of this is mitigated with a little blurb in the TOS saying that machine-applied discount codes are invalid and/or specifically calling out Honey.
@@jeffwells641 bet almost all the exclusive codes or affiliate related promo codes honey had were leaked by some of those users they were given to (as honey has a feature that let's you submit discount codes you find along w/ the percentage)
@@jeffwells641 Yeah, it's _literally_ a protection racket.
Crazy that if all of LTTs viewers had listened to them and installed Honey they would have lost that entire 9% chunk of their revenue just for a few ad deals.
Linus has shilled for countless scammy products and services. He’s lied about products and only apologized when he got too much heat for it.
Got zero sympathy for him.
dont care i have no sympathy for that man
@@JohnSmith-op7ls Examples?
I feel like as much as Linus is flawed, at least a lot of the criticism and flak that he receives comes from simply being open about his business.
Yes, he does mistakes. Literally _all_ of the major controversy from last year (two) was self-made, from the video errors to the Billet situation to the Madison situation. I unsubscribed because of it all, and have only returned to watching sporadically due to lack of content elsewhere.
At the same time tho, they've definitely mentioned some very public breakups before, Anker getting dropped got mentioned in a main channel video, Asus' Ally rug sweep got mentioned a lot in the new Ally X video, Nvidia also has a recent negative video about downgrading products without re-naming, not to say the many WAN mentions.
That's not to say that everything is good, as mentioned they've got bad stuff (did we ever get an update from Madison?) but at the same time they strike me as much more genuine and open than almost every other media company of a similar size or larger. Their products also seem to hold up, and while they are encouraged by locking interactions to MerchM... those who remember when they did superchats can remember that they definitely got an unsustainable amount of those (even the 3 figure ones) so their reasoning is sound.
@@thysonsacclaim there was that one time he apologized for them doing a raid shadow legends sponsorship but idk if that's what he's referring to, he has no others lol
I think megalag would be very interested in your affiliate story at the end for his followup videos
The final part of MegaLag's video implies that will be in one of the following videos.
@masterlinktm exactly
True, so would Legal Eagle
@@cc_snipergirlthe last part could be used by Honey to counter LE
Yeah but as far as I understood in this case Honey was doing exactly what they were meant to, they had found a "coupon" of sorts to reduce the price. Honey themselves weren't making any money because they didn't have an affiliate deal with that website. It was just a story to explain the reach of Honey, how many users it actually has...
Affiliate links don't tend to be much good to those of us outside of the US anyway since they usually link to the US stores. Honey didn't work when I tried it either.
we win by doing nothing
Yeah, that's why I like watching western youtubers, almost none of the deals and services work for me anyway and I can skip the add without feeling any kind of shame lol
That's why I never use them. They are pretty useless in Europe. I like to do my own research anyway.
@@greatwave2480 why would you feel any shame in the first place. UA-camr got paid, skip that add my brotha. I have a chrome extension just for that
@TheSpartanS196 well, there are some youtubers that put a lot of effort into their integrations, it's a shame to just skip all that work. Also once in a blue moon there is a good and genuinely useful sponsorship, a shame to miss it. It doesn't apply to American youtubers though because they usually just give basic lip service to sketchy products most of the time. So it's neither creative nor useful
I hope there's a giant class action lawsuit from this
I don't think there is any way to track where the money was stolen from. Because they probably didn't keep any records about who they were stealing the money from.
@@berenscott8999 I got $35 from a class action lawsuit against 1-800 Contacts for monopolistic behavior several years ago. I had receipts in my email, but I don't remember submitting them. If I recall correctly I just filled out a form that said I was a customer and provided a rough date of purchase. I don't think class action claims are highly vetted.
A few influencers? Honey filled their pockets with millions in order to sponsor videos.
@user-wl7dt1uw2e it's impossible to track who they stole from
Or better yet, the FTC fining them and shutting them down entirely.
Has anyone else noticed that Pie ads on youtube have completely vanished since this Honey scam was exposed? Prior to that basically all of my youtube ads were Pie for weeks.
8:22 Technical part starts.
13:28 New tab trick
17:00 Honey + Amazon part
Thanks. Idk why creators don't chapter their videos. Its not even hard. You wrote the video, you can use bots now to auto chapter for you at that
Honey's modern day racketeering protection scheme is mindblowing
"Hey, that's a nice storefront you've got there. Would be a shame if somebody found out about your staff discounts and let everyone use them through our extension."
-Honey Mafia
5:52 nwver installed honey but now i am gonna use affiliates from small channels for my next purchase
How PAYPAL got away with Honey. It's paypal.
PayPal has always been sketchy. Elon helped make it really bad. It was his idea to have PayPal randomly freeze accounts and effectively steal all the money in them
Elon uses his intelligence to scam people. They think because he's a legit borderline genius, and is clearly on the spectrum, that somehow that means he wouldn't try to rip them off.
@@JohnSmith-op7ls If you file against them in small claims you will get your money and filing fees back, they won't pay to defend their crap so they will pay up to not have to deal with it, been there and done that aver a $800 camera.
1. You just *know* they've made secret deals with the browser extension and app stores too.
2. UNINSTALL PIE AS WELL. Same people and it's going to be the same scam.
I'm still fucking flabbergasted.
This sort of thing is super old. Before it was done through cookie hijacking.
This is why you don’t use or buy anything YTers promote.
They either do zero due diligence or don’t care that it’s a scam.
I suspect you're 100% spot on. The teaser for part 2 implies this is going on.
At least when I pirate software, movies, tv, and games, I at least know what I'm getting into, and take steps accordingly.
You can also know what you're getting into when installing Honey or a similar extension. This fact that they make money off affiliate links was published on their website or you could have easily Googled it. Honey is also not the only company that uses this business model, just the one with the most aggressive marketing.
Many people who min-max discounts/savings have known how they worked for years now. It's a little bewildering how this is blowing up as some sort of major revelation.
1:13 if you buy at discounted prices, you still don't make money, you spend it.
Very true. Best thing to do is buy multiple of a product during a limited time major sale, then resell it later at full or slightly marked down price (depending on how available it is afterwards). Thats pretty much the only way buying something at discount could possibly "save" you money (and honestly, its a huge risk since there's no guarantee you'll be able to resell).
Sorry for the ramble, I just really vibe with your comment. 😅
The last 30 seconds of MegaLag's video implies that what you talk about at 23:33 is going to be apart of the next video he will release.
To me this indeed sounds like a violation of the terms of use for affiliates. If you think about it, it's not different to them silently open ad banner links in background, which wouldn't be allowed either.
Every single affiliate program has strict rules against manipulation, as was mentioned in the video, and has been for over a decade.
I'm pretty sure it violates the law because it's fraud.
They were smart enough to think of that - they went and made their own deals with these companies - for example instead of getting a 3% commission on amazon affiliate links like influencers get, Honey gets just 2% and in exchange Amazon doesn't make them follow the same rules as everybody else. And why is Amazon going to have any desire to crack down on that? They're getting to keep an additional 1% of the sale price of an item if Honey steals that affiliate link at the last second.
Now I kinda want to find affiliate links for stuff I buy just to make it more expensive for Amazon.
Simply use any link, doesn't have to be for exactly the stuff you buy. A link (or more precisely: the resulting cookie) is used for any kind of purchase it's not linked to a specific item.
If you are someone who wants to advance this along and see Honey have to explain itself, contact your State's Attorney General and ask to file a consumer complaint. Fill out all the paperwork. Make a claim for damages, and then forget about it. The process will take forever, and you'll likely not recover much, but you'll have done something positive.
Capital One extension does the exact same things.
Yep, and so do half a dozen other extensions. Honey nor Capital One were the first company with this business model. Are there any content creators even aware of this? 😅 Is this going to be another revelation video 5 years from now?
I was wondering if anyone was gonna say that, I use the capt 1 app, it gets me coupons on a few places I buy health goods from, so surprised it would. Even on occasion it will find one that works on ebay.
Extra fun thing here is Honey makes using coupon codes for attribution basically useless unless you pay into their protection racket, as exhibited in the Affinity Photo example. And those coupons tend to discount more aggressively because you're trying to provide end users an incentive to put in the coupon to get the attribution thread running. This also breaks proper attribution for campaigns directly from the brand, particularly if that brand provides a deeper discount via one channel vs. another...so the existence of Honey winds up decreasing the promotional levers a brand can pull, especially if their promo code system isn't particularly advanced. Which sucks.
Please note why Amazon is so strict with not showing the price and time. You know why. Just a reminder.
It's because they raise the price and tell you they lowered it
okay, you answered a question to me, that I wondered about, but not enough to ask: I get those articles on german computer websites, amazon sells this or that item for really cheap. okay, really cheap, but they don't say the actual price. you explained, that they aren't allowed to show the price, or they get booted off the affiliate program.
thank you for showing that to me.
This was fascinating. Have watched the Megalag video about 20 times watching creators react to it. Yours was a fascinating deep dive into how it works. Thanks.
I really enjoyed this video and learned a lot beyond the scope of the topic. You're a great teacher, I know nothing about web dev stuff. Thanks!
20:00 Honey's leverage is even more simple than anything you mentioned. Honey can just say "hey we found a better deal on a different website" and forcibly drive traffic away from amazon.
That would be a good thing
Not how honey works. It interacts at the checkout, not as a site redirect.
@@bustatron Redirecting to a different site is still possible, but it's almost certainly an even more egregious breach of the browsers' terms of service so would be a very risky play and could get them booted from the Chrome store, for example.
That would be good for the buyer, and since a lot of third party businesses sell on Amazon’s platform, it would be a good for them too since the buyer can buy directly from them and avoid paying Amazon commission. Those amazon referral fees can be 8-30% of the items price so it makes sense to partner with Honey than pay Amazon’s fee. It’s probably why Honey isn’t banned from Amazon as an affiliate as well as the fact that Amazon is giving Honey a 1% commission for stealing a 3% commission from people who made the sale.
Knowing how big corporates work, they'll probably push a few of their staff under the bus and pretend they have no involvement. Because if you login to your Pay Pal account now, there's still an option to "Add Honey for free" in your Pay Pay account so either they aren't aware of this, or is already coming up with countermeasures should Legal Eagle take this to court and they get a notice.
I wonder if what Honey is doing also goes against Chrome’s Web Store (Extension store) policies.
That might be the only way to shut down something this widespread. Have Google declare it (and extensions like it) malware and remove them from the chrome store.
Though with the exposure this is now getting it may be shut down anyway.
Not that being nefarious has stopped PayPal in the past... But maybe this time.
@@MorphishfulI do wonder tho; But I do hope Google shuts it down, because Google is so freaking strict with their Store policy. Extension authors are obliged to publicly state what the Extension does and how it interacts with the permissions you give to it. They definitely do not disclosure that, hence the Extension can definitely be removed for breaking the policies.
Well it doesn't block ads so I think Google is fine with it.
You just *know* they've also made deals with all the browser extension "stores" so they don't get banned.
It's fraud so it's illegal.
In my work, we have very strict security. One time, my ESET antivirus started detecting things out of nowhere. I knew it was somehow related to my browser, so it had to be connected to my extensions. I went through all the extensions I had and found two culprits:
1. An extension for detecting font names
2. Honey
I uninstalled both of them, but I had strong suspicions about Honey. As a developer, I also didn't like that it was always filling my local storage with weird values-I prefer to keep things clean. As a result, I had to even reinstall my OS and switched to Linux :)
what does linux has to do with anything... you can install a normal browser and honey on linux too bro
You have very strict security at work, yet you had random browser extensions installed?
@@pinksapple linux nerds can't write 1 sentence without mentioning that they use linux
@theairaccumulator7144actually true 😂
Someone should make an extension that detects the absence of an affiliate cookie and let's you opt to apply the cookie of a creator you follow before checkout
would be a nice alternative, give money if not creded to anyone else.
And they should call it Vinegar. 😂
Maybe there's also a way to support creators without having to rely on affiliate marketing? Sure, revenue would likely take a hit, but I find it problematic that nobody is seeing the big picture of driving Amazon sales for a 3% share. I think we should really take a step back and question our habits as consumers and grow some conscience in this regard, because ultimately we always end up lining the pockets of these big corporations.
Patreon?
Just telling consumers "make more ethical choices" has literally never worked. The way you deal with Amazon isn't by mass consumer boycott - it will just never happen, and you'll never make enough people care enough about the issue enough to spend more money than they otherwise would for a product. The only way to reign in a company like Amazon is with regulations backed up by harsh penalties for violating them. That is something people will vote for if you give them the option to, even if the end result is the same and people end up paying more for products because money can't be saved by mistreating employees anymore.
I mean... How many patreon ads do you see each time you're on UA-cam?
If Amazon doesn't ban Honey despite it violating their TOS, the most likely situation is that Amazon only pays Honey a reduced percentage. So lets say affiliates would have earned $100M, but Honey seizes 50% of that. This would normally mean that Amazon would owe Honey $50M, but Honey could tell Amazon "just pay us 30% of what we seize." This is then in Amazon's best interest , because Honey is then decreasing Amazon's total affiliate payout.
It must be something along those lines, because Amazon is blatantly colluding with Honey in ripping off Amazon's own affiliates. They wouldn't do that unless there was something in it for Amazon.
Yeah something like this. And if you think about it, that means amazon also threw their affiliate partners under the bus and let honey steal from them.
This is one of the best fact-based, technical overview follow-up videos on the honey app investigation. Thank you. Well done.
I LOVE chrometana, I didn't think anyone else used it, kudos dude, that thing was badass.
Been watching Megalag for years. One of the best channels on yt. And he just keeps getting better and better.
2 things: you should mention Paypal. They are behind Honey. Then, I'm sure but don't have the initiative to investigate, that Honey will apply (for example) a 10% code to users but use a bigger discount code at the shop and pocket the difference. That would be very easy to pull off.
They really do that. In Megalag's video, he has shown how it works for different instances. Even in cases where people aren't coming in with an affiliate link, i.e., the entire purchase amount goes to the store, Honey applies its own affiliate code, so they take a % off the money the store was going to earn. Therefore, even if a store has a deal with them for people with affiliate links where they are preventing the customer from getting a higher discount, they are stealing some money on the side where the store could have had the entire amount of a sale for themselves. And I'm sure if you compare the no. of people coming in with an affiliate link to those who don't, the latter would be higher and Honey pockets a % of them all of the customer has Honey installed. So, when they'll show the data to the store, the store will think all the people who got Honey affiliate link came from another affiliate link not that they are simply a Honey user instead and Honey pasted its link even if they didn't come in with an affiliate link. There is also this instance where "checkout with Paypal" pops up on Honey even if the option is available on the site itself, thus Honey could apply their affiliate link once again stealing a % of the sale.
That's impossible to do without the user not noticing.
The user gets an invoice and the user pays to the website, not to honey.
I think the way Honey only opens their affiliate link after you click a button is intentional. They want to be able to use the argument "the user clicked something, so it doesn't go against policy!" in court.
4:45 unclear to me why you assert the last-click paradigm is fair - it strikes me as arbitrary and unfair. Why not share affiliate revenue across all affiliate links in the cart?
It was just the easiest to implement, and everyone ran with it. And now it's a standard, so…
Because of the big issue of how any of it is fair with so many different possibilities.
Just consider a few scenarios:
1 - I click a link for a computer. Decide that I want to get a monitor to go with it and buy both. Is it fair for them to get money for the monitor?
2 - I click a link for a computer. Also entirely separately and what I was already planning on doing, I buy a board game as well. Is it fair for them to get money for the board game?
3 - I click a link for a computer but decide to not add it to my cart because I don't want it. Also entirely separately and what I was already planning on doing, I buy a board game. Is it fair for them to get money for the board game?
4 - I click a link for a computer, but decide to get a similar one, but not the same one. Is it fair for them to get the money for that other computer?
5 - I already have items in my cart, then I go click a link for a computer. Is it fair for them to get the money for everything already in the cart?
Now for each of scenarios, imagine before I check out, I also use a different link, and get 2 items, one equivalent to each of these scenarios (except the last as they are all basically that now).
Who should get money for what item?
There is no way it could possibly be done where everything is done "fairly".
You cannot easily tell the difference between an item bought because of the referral vs an item bought coincidentally after the referral.
This way it errs on the side of favouring the affiliate to get more money, which also makes it much simpler, as you just track the one for the cart. But that then means it is only 1 per cart, and that is the last one as they were the one that got the sale.
You can even compare this to a salespeople.
You go to a store, and a salesperson comes up and tries to convince you to buy something, but is unsuccessful.
Then later, a different salesperson comes up and is successful. Who should get the commission? The first one didn't get the sale, but did they really contribute nothing at all?
Appreciate your broad perspective. This subject deserves even more explainers from even more perspectives to spread the word in ways that different folks will understand. Cheers!
If I watch a UA-cam video on my iPad, which is what I usually do, click on an affiliate link there and add it to my basket using the Amazon app, then later go to my desktop to purchase all the items in the basket; do you get the commission?
I usually add things to my Amazon basket over a few weeks, then once I either have something I need to be delivered urgently, or go over the threshold for free shipping, I then proceed to purchase the stuff.
Nope. The cookie is on the iPad. The only way that commissions are transferable like you mention is if you use a code. So you add an item to the basket, add the code "THEO123" in their discount box, then finish the purchase on your PC. Provided that they are smart enough to store cart sessions with coupon codes, not everyone does.
There may be exceptions to this where they store the affiliate cookie value in the cart session on their servers (not only in your browser), but I doubt many do.
The order of operations is “last click attribution for everything in the cart.” So, if you’re entirely in the Apple ecosystem, adding items to your cart on iPad or iPhone will apply attribution to the influencer on an Apple desktop presuming your desktop has not more recently added the last item from a different influencer. All of that is shared across Apple via Safari/iCloud. If you’re an Apple mobile device user but using a Windows desktop and Chrome, it gets a lot more convoluted.
@@richbininger8859 but cookies are browser/app on device level data. They are not shared across ecosystem or 2 diff browsers or same app on 2 devices. Only browsing history is shared across devices for browsers. In that case if you open the same affiliated link again on diff device then only it can happen.
I don't think affiliated link data is stored on the Amazon cart level.
No
@@richbininger8859 No thats not how browsers work. They dont transfer site data among browsers or devices. that will be a big privacy issue otherwise. If the url is opened again via history then only the attribution will go to the influencer
Thanks for this! Great deep dive into the further details of what's going on. I also can't wait to see what Megalag is going to cover in episode 2 and 3!
I think what you mentioned, with the affiliate code being abused by honey, is actually what Megalag will be talking about in the next video if his teaser is anything to go by. Seems like business owners who hadn’t partnered with Honey having affiliate codes or maybe even codes given to business partners for crazy discounts having their codes found by or uploaded to honey and losing tons of money as now they have to give a discount on top of giving money to Honey in some way or the original owner of the affiliate link. Probably done to strong arm the business into working with them or to run them out of business so the people they work with get more traffic.
24:23 it's also worth mentioning, this is the current user count _after_ the news came out, I think honey had something like 20-22 million users before megalag's video
I always wondered why creators don't mention the price of the product the video is about. It's because they have an afiliate link 🤦
Extension can access cookies if it has permission for “Access all your data on all sites”. Honey does have this permission. However, they don’t directly override the cookies because that would be more complicated, as each store would have its own way of naming the cookie and its value.
about that point w/ affiliate links, more often people would have stuff like affiliate stuff stripped out, as they are trying to remove stuff in URLs that may track them. So many may be stripping affiliate links as part of trying not to be tracked online instead of wanting to screw everyone out of affiliate revenue.
I do it for both.
I don't generally go out of my way to use discounts in general, but if I'm not the one getting the benefit I doubly do not care.
If I'm going out of my way to use any kind of code then it needs to be a discount for me, or I'm not going to bother at all.
@RunicSigils makes sense from a consumer POV. At least some retailers understand and do mix the promo and affiliate stuff so you can get a deal too.
Several years ago, Brian Dunning went to jail for just this sort of cookie stuffing. Let's see if Paypal suffers the same fate.
3:46 why is minecraft 0% listed there?
Maybe Bedrock marketplace sales
That is an interesting point, because Amazon did go against Honey at one point as you've mentioned, but than they still allow them to have an Affiliate link, which they need to register themselves, meaning they know about what Honey is doing to some degree
2:07 but thats outdated
in the video linus says that distribution has changed a lot
i believe that's when Linus was still running honey sponsorships. so it's still applicable
Sure, but it still illustrates the point that affiliate programs make a very significant amount of money for creators instead of just being a little bonus.
You know you can set up your own affiliate links so you get the money instead of the creators.
Honey needs to be removed by Google and Firefox. How do we get that to happen?
most people won't care, they only care about the discounts
The benefit of stripping affiliate links is that I disincentivize the practice. I don't believe that I will be referred to good or necessary products when those providing codes are motivated as such.
Yes we get it all marketing is evil, you're totally immune to it. Way to stick it to the man, by giving Amazon that 3%.
@@HydraulicDesign It isn't about sticking it to the man. Advertising is annoying, and being referred to a product for a commission increases the likelihood that a product I am being referred to is low quality. If I could pay the 3% to no one I would, but I certainly will not be a part of the problem.
You have a very "special" phenotype
@@HydraulicDesign Very mature comment.
Not just creators but all affiliate publishers are being scammed. How can Google allow this extension?
someone should make a add-on that lets you pick which affiliate you want specifically
That'd be an instaban offense and considered "fraud" by vendors. Honey got away with this by making deals with vendors.
@@beskamir5977 ban from what? The addon wouldn't have any agreement with the site.
Did you not watch the video, or comment before 6:30 into it?
The saddest thing is that honeys usage numbers will go up due to this drama. I never used honey, I refused to install it because it smelled fishy from the get go and I knew that creators would lose their affiliate money. Also I don't install extensions for security reason.
Users fall into three groups: 1) users like me chose not use honey. 2) users who chose to use honey because the discount is more important than the creators, their privacy and their security 3) users who didn't know about honey until now.
The first two groups will not change, no one will uninstall honey because it works as advertised for the end user. The third group will now chose to install it or not. Therefore the number of installs will increase. It's that sad.
You're wrong about one thing - honey does NOT work as advertised for the end user. It is advertised as a way to find the best coupon codes online automatically. In reality they will actively withhold the best coupon codes from the users if the company you're buying the product from is partnered with Honey, offering maybe a 5% discount when a 15% discount code exists if you manually searched for it. So it's not even a case of they just didn't find the better coupon code before you did, it's a case of them actively withholding the best discount codes for users even when they know damn well they exist because the company paid them to not tell you about those discounts.
@ you are right, but nobody expects the absolute best discounts, just discounts in an easy way, and it that regard it delivers. Which is why many users will not stop using it.
@@Krmpfpks They advertised the best discounts so I am sure plenty of people DID expect the best discounts - and at the very least they expected the company to not purposefully hide the best discounts from them because they've been paid off. I don't know anybody who is going to continue using it after this, and the idea that people would start using it after hearing about it for the first time because of the scandal is just laughable to me. The company is basically cooked at this point - not only have their business practices been laid bare meaning no UA-camr will ever accept a sponsorship from them again, they're also getting sued. And not even sued by the people they offered sponsorships too - sued by people they essentially stole commissions from and had never accepted a Honey sponsorship.
@@Krmpfpks I just looked it up, and they've lost 3 million installs since the video came out. You're just wrong about people not caring about this.
@ really? Where did you get that number from?
That is unexpected to me, let’s see how many will reinstall as soon as they go shopping for something more expensive.
But for now I am happy to be wrong.
wait so you're telling me that if I like a specific youtuber and there is an ad that plays, that they get more money if I click on the advert than just watching it? I already disable my adblocker on youtubers I really like, so spending an extra like 5 seconds to click and them close an advert is something I'd be willing to do if they got more money from it.
I don't think it does in UA-cam.
Iirc that's also considered a form of advertising fraud and if the company paying for the ad can reasonably show that people clicking the ad had no intention of purchasing it can be used as a reason to not pay the creator for the ad at all (especially if they can point to said creator encouraging that behavior). This is why I've occasionally seen some creators specifically ask for you to only click the ad if you are actually interested in the product, because a suspicious number of clicks without purchases could hurt them worse than if you did nothing.
I almost never comment, and it's my first time watching anything from this channel, but I just gotta say, wow, this video was really good quality. Well done, dude! Both thorough and detailed, but explained in a clear and simple enough way that a non-tech-savvy person like me could understand it. Not to mention, nice audio. Keep doing what you’re doing.
Browser extensions malware again, after that being the case always.
Props to you on willingly returning/not taking some of that referral credit when your code got spread to everyone. I’m not sure I could have done the same. The irony is that’s how the extension is presented as working-crowdsourcing codes to save folks money.
12:07 they do have access if they run js and adding ui to the page with active_tab permission. The only protection is the manual review frome the store. I think they use new page trick just to avoid needing to know the exact cookie format for each store
I'm pretty sure at least some of those cookies are cryptographically signed, so Honey couldn't fake them even if they tried
Using the fake background page is more reliable. Amazon can not change the fact those URLs are supposed to create an affiliate association via GET request without breaking every historical affiliate link from their program which would deny affiliates revenue from their prior youtube videos etc.
Since affiliate links can be used from virtually any source (social media, forums, emails, youtube, even copied from a non-hyperlinked document) it is perfectly reasonable for there to be zero metadata such as referrer sent with the request.
Amazon's best mitigation strategies would be to adopt the more complex sort of checkout attribution to prevent new affiliate links from completely taking over a user's cart/cookie/session association. It would be much easier to kick Honey from their program and otherwise blocking this sort of fraudulent afficilate link highjacking via policy enforcement than doing that.
The weaker mitigation strategy Amazon could adopt would be to have their link handler apply minimimum refresh time for the affiliate cookie (cookie value would have to contain a set-timestamp and be signed). For example, if I followed an affiliate link it would only update my affiliate cookie to the new affiliate if the cookie either 1) was absent, 2) matched the current cookie affiliate 3) or the set-timestamp was > X minutes ago where X was something like 30-60 minutes. This would prevent extensions like honey from immediately overwriting a just applied affiliate link. However it would still allow them to farm all unassociated checkouts or session that took a longer amount of time between click and checkout which has the problems like with Affinity2 and Honey not really doing anything to deserve the kickback from Amazon.
Smile used to let you send 0.5% to a charity; but that ended a few years ago.
i use extensions to clear affiliate links because i don't like the system and don't think it should be promoted. i am also not wasting time in going back to a video (or blog, or whatever) to add the affiliate link, this shit is what brought us the infinite affiliate-link-copywrite-zero-value-added blog farms that have topped the search results of google in the first place which basically destroyed any credibility most of reviews online could have
He just wants your money. He probably also hopes you don't block ads.
I’m happy to give free money to people who make stuff I like. I’m not happy to give free money to low content blog farms that recommend me whatever gets them the most from affiliates.
Your actively being scummy if you want to consume stuff made by creators you want to succeed and simultaneously claim that “they just want your money don’t give them any” when it is literally free money for them and doesn’t cost you anything.
I completely get blocking ads they cost you time and money affiliate links don’t. The primary reason I block them is because I block all link tracking, if I could add affiliate links back without giving away more detailed data I would.
@@SimplyWondering No, I just don't want to have a reward structure that allows people to profit from getting me to purchase something. It incentivizes them to get me to consume more for their own benefit, and doesn't in any way require them to be honest or helpful in this.
Ok congratulations on giving Jeff Bezos all that money. I also got the ick when money started coming into these things, but it doesn't take much paying attention to realise who is honest about the products they talk about and who isn't. And if I want the honest guys to exist, I'll support them.
@@Electric_Billso you'd rather reward Amazon. Jerk
For the affiliate tracking, i guess they could embed the cookie with the product and compare the cart at checkout. But that would probably be resource-extensive if one were to click a lot of links and have big ass carts.
Also, its such a good move on your part to reject the affiliate money. You're a good person.
day by day, big corps. are doing the most low-life shit they can
This is why it bugs me when people block cookies because "cookies are bad"
The influencers who promote Honey and got PAID are not "victims" ---- Any affiliate marketers who did not promote Honey, did not use Honey, and had signed NO agreement with Honey and got their affiliate links/cookies hijacked are the real victims!
So where in the agreement does it state that after they pay the creator for the advertisement, Honey will rob them of all their referrals?
DUDE they'll be lucky if the DOJ doesn't pay 'em the devs of this ext. a visit
Hey Theo, I can’t find that infinity video you were talking about. Can I get some help?
Its not that no one uses smile anymore, its that they discontinued it. I used to use it as much as I could as I could direct them towards some type of autism research (my son has autism). That you could choose a charity was really cool so it was upsetting to me when Amazon stopped it.
This channel needs a different sign out phrase!
Never installed Honey. I knew something wasn't right. No such thing as free lunch.
I will appologize. I have never used an affilate link. Ever, I appreciate your explaination.... thats that. Never to late to change behaviors.
I'm so glad you explained this so well, I wouldn't click on the original video because of the horrible click bait thumbnail and I still won't give it the view because of it.
Yapping and yapping and me this me that but there’s no new information or new context
These days, it is a good bet to assume anyone sponsoring UA-cam videos is a scam until proven otherwise.
always strip affiliate links, only use coupon codes
Hmmm, how about no? Why would you decide to not pay content creators when it adds no more cost to you?
@@InternetDoggo yes
Honey has always been very suspicious to me. Something about it has always come off as iffy.
if a content creator got sponsored by Honey and didnt expose it after seeing what it was doing then they are at fault. Theres a reason im a no extension guy, extensions are way too dodgy.
Just one caveat which is it depends on if there’s a non disparagement clause.
I'm a no shitty extension guy
simple tab groups - godsend
bitwarden - heaven juice
things I build myself - I'm an idiot but I make it do, it's useful to me, so it's enough
but I agree, a lot of extensions do a lot more than what they tell you they do...
tru
>downloads everything from AUR
A lot of extensions are open source. I've used extensions for years and even audited a few. There are a lot of good addons/extensions out there. The vast majority do not do shady stuff like this.
required extensions for quality of life:
- tree style tabs
- ublock origin (non-lite version ofc)
- bitwarden
- dark reader or similar
for youtube decrapifying:
- sponsorblock (for yt)
- violentmonkey with revert youtube ui changes userscript
- stylus with adashimaatube
- indie wiki buddy if you don't want low quality fandom wikis
- reddit enhancement suite
jfc this just keeps getting worse. I hadn't even thought about it, but you are 100% correct that the big online retailers are aware of what honey is doing and they are letting them do it.
Is it just me or does it seem that these affiliate links and such are just another reason purchase prices have gone up exponentially? obviously inflation as well - but these were “costs” that never used to be considered when pricing an item to sell…
I mean, we'll have to see what MegaLag has to say in part 2
You're a CEO?! Funny you don't look useless
Thank you for the analysis. I really appreciate you video qnd like the form of content you make. Subscribed ❤