8 ms·

Title is misleading. The original team behind Honey has created a new company that is doing this and not Honey itself which is owned by Paypal.

• tantalor 2y ago
  Do we know when Honey started stealing affiliate links? Was it after the acquisition?
  • benjaminl 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • mcny 2y ago
      > The only thing that I never understood was why brands would allow Honey to be an affiliate. Why would they want to pay Honey any money when Honey doesn’t originate any traffi? One YouTube channel, theo dot gg has a conspiracy theory about it which is honey: 1. amassed a huge (rabid) user base 2. Offered "protection" to companies The evidence presented is Amazon dot com affiliates walk on eggshells to avoid breaking Toss that Honey completely tramples on so at the very least honey is not subject to the same tos as everybody. However, Amazon dot com is very aware of honey evidenced by advisory warnings on Amazon dot com website from a few years ago. So I think basically the strategy here was: 1. Pay a lot of money to buy a user base 2. Offer protection to stores if they do certain things 3. Deliberately don't give the best offers to users if the stores pay this protection money, wreck the store somehow(?) if they don't 4. Profit
      • happymellon 2y ago
        > However, Amazon dot com is very aware of honey evidenced by advisory warnings on Amazon dot com website from a few years ago. I missed this, do you have any more information on it?
        • mcny 2y ago
          Here is an article from January 2020 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-10/amazon-tells-shoppers-paypal-s-4-billion-honey-is-security-risk https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-10/amazon-te... --- PayPal Holdings Inc. made a big bet in November with its $4 billion acquisition of Honey, a web browser extension that helps online shoppers find the lowest prices. Now Amazon.com Inc. is warning customers not to use the tool. Shortly before Christmas, Amazon said Honey posed a security risk, which was reported Thursday by Wired. The warning perplexed some online shopping experts since the tool has been available for several years and Amazon makes no similar warnings about other browser extensions such as price tracker camelcamelcamel.com.
          • happymellon 2y ago
            Yeah, that tiny blurb was all I could find, which doesn't really tell me anything. > The evidence presented is Amazon dot com affiliates walk on eggshells to avoid breaking Toss that Honey completely tramples on so at the very least honey is not subject to the same tos as everybody. However, Amazon dot com is very aware of honey evidenced by advisory warnings on Amazon dot com website from a few years ago. I don't get this, if Amazon really thought that Honey was "trampling on Amazon's TOS" surely they would just ban Honeys affiliate status? If anything this implies to me that someone had a grudge.
            • mcny 2y ago
              It could also mean Amazon dot com has decided that it was not possible to kill honey and it was better to join them rather than trying to and failing to kill honey. I think it is already proven that honey does not automatically show the best coupons for its users. So how and when does honey decide to hold back? The conspiracy theory is honey decides to hold back when there is an agreement with the vendor. Now logically, why would honey intentionally give its users a poorer experience? It makes sense to me that honey will only do so intentionally if honey is getting paid to do so.
              • happymellon 2y ago
    • kotaKat 2y ago
      > Why would they want to pay Honey any money when Honey doesn’t originate any traffi? Paying Honey means you can limit the discounts available through Honey, sort of like a shitty protection scheme. Because Honey bills itself to the consumer as the be-all-end-all coupon and discount app and advertises itself as "we know ALL the coupon codes and discounts", a consumer with the Honey extension will likely not look outside of that for a discount and assume whatever they got from the extortion racket as the end customer was "the best deal".
      • tiborsaas 2y ago
        > Paying Honey means you can limit the discounts available through Honey, sort of like a shitty protection scheme. But the merchant controls the discounts, if they want to stop spreading higher discount codes they can do it any time. If I had an affiliate program, I would not allow Honey on my platform.
        • Thorrez 2y ago
          Does Honey get the full amount from the affiliate programs? What if Honey only gets a fraction? Then the merchant might be happy to pay Honey 1/10 of the normal affiliate amount if Honey puts its own affiliate code there instead of some Youtube reviewer's affiliate code, which would earn the Youtuber the full affiliate value.
    • Dylan16807 2y ago
      "Earning money from affiliate links" and "stealing affiliate links" are not the same thing. There is a big range of behaviors here, and they're right at the worst end of it. I'm surprised by how far they went, not that affiliate links were involved at all.
    • Ukv 2y ago
      People are upset that: 1. Honey makes money through deals with retailers to not offer the best coupon code to the extension's users 2. Honey swaps out the referral code from the blog/video/etc. that actually referred you to the product with their own, even when they didn't find any coupon deal Merely "Honey makes commissions from our merchant partners" is not at all a "very upfront" description of that behavior. Moreover, many of the people affected by this are reviewers/etc. who have never themselves used Honey so had no particular reason to look into how it works.
      • Xelynega 2y ago
        The two together results in honey essentially being paid instead of real affiliates to suppress coupon codes from you(since they advertise to stores that they direct users away from finding coupons, and towards a more stable discount percentage).
        • lodovic 2y ago
          This is hard to grasp. Do I understand correctly that some web pages may display a coupon code for a discount on some possible future sale. And the Honey extension detects this coupon code and replaces it with a different coupon with less discount? This all seems so absurd, making money by skimming hypothetical discounts.
          • sitharus 2y ago
            From what I understand, no, they don’t replace coupons you’ve entered. Honey’s advertising message was “never search for a coupon again” and “we’ll ensure you always have the best discount possible”. However in reality a merchant could sign up as a Honey partner and for a mere 3-5% commission they’d let you set the coupons that Honey would show. So for example if your business gave a 20% promotional coupon to a small community, you could set Honey to ignore it and only show a 5% coupon in the coupon search. People with the 20% coupon will still get to use it, but Honey will never supply it. So not only was Honey removing affiliate revenue from the people promoting it, it wasn’t giving the people using it the best deal that it promised.
    • LiamPowell 2y ago
      They literally advertise this as a feature on their home page in that they give you X% of what they earn from affiliate links. It says a lot about the influencers advertising it if they did not realise that Honey is taking their affiliate revenue while reading an ad that says they do. More realistically, most of them likely did know that this is what Honey does and determined that honey paid more than any lost revenue, but know that saying that would lead to some of this outrage being directed at them. As a bonus, by asking users to uninstall Honey they can have their money from running Honey ads previously and money from their affiliate links too. The only way I can maybe see influencers being unaware of this if if they read an ad that only talked about the coupon feature and they never bothered to even visit the Honey homepage or try it themselves, which would be a pretty bad look for them. I also think most users that use Honey have to know that this is what it does given that, again, it's an advertised feature. I suspect most people outraged at this are people that never used the tool in the first place. I certainly think it's a bad product as it defeats the purpose of affiliate links and reduces revenue for anyone using affiliate links for their intended purpose, but I don't think they were misleading anyone about what the product does.
      • Retric 2y ago
        If a company says they make money “selling cars” you don’t assume they get those cars through theft. Same deal here, saying they get affiliate money doesn’t imply they overwrite existing affiliate links which is about a clear a case of tortious interference as you could find. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tortious_interference So, no Honey didn’t disclose what people are complaining about.
        • LiamPowell 2y ago
          I agree that it's likely tortious interference, I just don't agree that they're being deceptive. I think it's reasonable to say that most of the target market would be considered tech-savvy enough to know how these purchase affiliate programs work and the influencers advertising it absolutely do. If users are not aware of how this works then I have to question where they think the cashback comes from, and if they are aware that it comes from the business they are making a purchase from then I have to question why they think the business would give a commission to Honey on top of the existing commission to wherever a link was clicked from. I think a majority of users would have to be somewhat wilfully ignorant to not question why money is being given back to them whenever they make a purchase.
    • cavisne 2y ago
      Capital one shopping (basically the same thing) definitely originates traffic, like it prompts users to go to other websites for a better deal.
    • skeeter2020 2y ago
      >> We earn these commissions when a member uses Honey to find available savings or to activate PayPal Rewards Do you really think that clicking an "OK" button to dismiss a dialog after Honey doesn't find any coupons that secretly reloads the page your on and replaces the affliate cookie with its own is just "earning money from affiliate links?" That's just one of the super shady things they do. Same with Paypal rewards. They entice users to click the rewards button to again steal the affiliate cookie, and pay them a few cents while they take tens of dollars in affiliate commision.
    • 14 2y ago
      My guess to your question would be that perhaps there is the belief, or maybe data proves it factual, that when someone is considering a purchase and might be on the fence and then they see that Honey can get them a coupon or rewards points that they are then slightly more likely to go through with the purchase thinking they are getting a good deal. If data shows an increase in sales then some might consider affiliating worth it. Just my guess.
    • miki123211 2y ago
      > The only thing that I never understood was why brands would allow Honey to be an affiliate. Why would they want to pay Honey any money when Honey doesn’t originate any traffi? Because Honey has leverage. Just to provide one example, Honey can very easily hurt Amazon's bottom line by adding random affiliate codes (of independent creators) to every transaction. This wouldn't make them any money, but would bring them to the negotiating table. Instead, Amazon can work out a deal with them where they get half the standard affiliate fee, and Amazon pockets the rest. Amazon is happy because they pay 1.5% to Honey instead of paying 3% to a different creator, Honey is happy because they get 1.5% instead of nothing, and Honey users are happy because if Honey is well-funded, they'll use some of that money on letting them find good deals online. This is just one of the ways it could have played out; it's also possible that e.g. Honey had good access to some kind of Amazon discount codes that they kept applying too often, which Amazon didn't like, so they worked out a deal that wasn't too bad for Amazon and great for Honey.
    • kelseydh 2y ago
      At no point in that writeup does Honey say they use cookie stuffing to fraudulently steal affiliate attribution when no discount code is found. This is a serious crime: people have gone to prison for cookie stuffing affiliate codes (see: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdal/pr/cookie-stuffing-internet-fraud-schemer-pleads-guilty-0 https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdal/pr/cookie-stuffing-interne...) Google removes chrome extensions cookie stuffing affiliate codes: https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-removes-two-chrome-ad-blocker-extensions-caught-cookie-stuffing/ https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-removes-two-chrome-ad-b...
  • kristofferR 2y ago
    Before, this is how ALL coupon sites/extensions have worked for decades. I'm frankly baffled it weren't more common knowledge, despite being common sense, before the MegaLag video. Did people really think that sites like retailmenot.com or wethrift.com make you open tabs to the shop you're searching for coupons for before you can see the coupon code just for fun?? Affiliate code stuffing is the coupon provider business model, it's not Honey-exclusive at all. I'd be surprised if you find a coupon site/extension that haven't always done that.
    • josephg 2y ago
      Utter scumbags. The google chrome & Firefox extension stores should ban the lot of ‘em.
      • throwaway48476 2y ago
        Honestly the developers should be banned by name from using the Firefox extension store. So they don't come back with yet another scam.
    • Suppafly 2y ago
      Honestly I knew that that coupon websites were adding their affiliate link to links from their websites, but it never occurred to me that the toolbars would be stripping and replacing affiliate links from actual links you were clicking yourself. I wouldn't mind if they were transparent about what they were doing or gave you the option to substitute your own code specifically. I'm sure there are a lot of situations where I've clicked an affiliate link to check something out and then that affiliate got credit for other things I've purchased hours or days later. I'd really like a toolbar that let me modify or block the affiliate code from those links.
      • kristofferR 2y ago
        On Firefox you could use a separate container for your coupon site visits, but do the buying in another container.
• Brian_K_White 2y ago
  Title says team behind honey. (was it changed?)