Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam [video](youtube.com) |
Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam [video](youtube.com) |
Once shared, they are presented to other users, who can try and validate them, or indicate they don't work (for single-use coupons or expired promotions). "Bad" coupons get removed, good coupons keep getting presented to users.
It’s amazing IJ from MegaLag, but what’s do we expect going forward?
Honey was essentially given a slap on the wrist by a pseudo-regulator, BBB [1]
Yet another slap on the wrist with a civil suit? Honey changes their T&C. Lawyers get their massive cut of the class action settlement while individual consumers, “influencers” get a pittance?
Nothing ever changes unless C-suite starts going to jail.
[1] https://bbbprograms.org/media-center/dd/nad-honey-science-co...
There are at least the following claims:
- Inserts its own affiliate link (even when no discount is found, uses strategies to push for interaction like adding a dismiss/pay with paypal link that adds the affiliate association)
- Adds a very small kickback from the affiliate payment they receive as a rewards program. (Which, while scraps, makes content creators "lose" in economic terms in the affiliate offerings)
- Promises to consumers to find the best discounts available
- Promises to vendors to allow control of the discounts offered and the offer rate of said discounts
- Previous both promises are contradictory yet simultaneously offered
- An extra/upcoming claim around forcing non-affiliated stores to affiliate.
Honey does the following:
- Stealing the commission from an affiliate link assigned to someone else
- Cutting itself a commission by inserting an affiliate link, when there was none, essentially profiting off you without your consent.
- Gives you the worst discount code possible, while saying it got you the best deal
- Cheating the companies doing the affiliate marketing by taking credit for purchases that happened without honey's involvement
I bet it surprises everyone who had their affiliate links quietly swapped out.
> Would I call this scam? No, I wouldn't.
Then your definition of 'scam' needs work.
While we might expect PayPal's Honey to scam people like this, and be less than surprised that they would screw people over in this way, that doesn't mean this doesn't have every element of a scam - deception and trickery (and likely illegality).
Honey is a parasite stealing from other parasites.
You don't need to join it, but then your customers get automagically the high value coupons applied, but if you pay them $XX per month, you can limit what gets applied.
Remember kids: Marketing is a psychopathy.
I was completely unaware that it sneakily overrides any existing affiliate codes, AND does this even if it hasn't found any discount whatsoever.
It's hard to see this as anything other than fraudulent.
The Chrome team seems like the one that would be most pissed about this. While some aspects of their management of the extension ecosystem are problematic, they make an effort regarding trust and security. The reason Honey has to be so aggressive in getting you to click a button in that popup window is the browser won't allow it to interact with the page (to swap out the cookies) until the user has affirmatively interacted with the extension on that page. That is intended to prevent extensions from maliciously manipulating third-party sites without user consent.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdal/pr/cookie-stuffing-interne...
Alternatively, Manifest v3 is supposed to make things like this a lot harder. Users would need to activate the plugin rather than the plugin popping up all the time if I understand it correctly. Manifest v3 was designed to enforce better privacy practices in the Wild West of browser extensions.
PayPal is one of the payment methods offered by Google for all kinds of things such as the Play Store, YouTube subscriptions etc. I use it myself for those purposes.
It might sour things between them?
It's wild how quickly online businesses went from exciting to shady and scammy.
Feels like 2003-2013 was a golden age for internet services.
Kind of insane how they intentionally override existing affiliate codes at checkout even if it doesn't save you money.
I switched to Rakuten for cashback and PriceLasso and Keepa for price tracking.
It goes without saying that there's conflict of interest, but the interesting bit is such conflict arises because of crude thinking from the execs about what makes discount code works.
Discounts is a form of marketing, simple as that. If your company sells products at a discount, it means that you're spending extra marketing cost to sell higher volumes. Anyone in the middle distributing this discount information will charge extra for their service.
Anyone competing to charge companies for marketing can only meaningfully compete on cost and reach. In terms of cost, most discount code websites tend to only give small discounts to consumers as the 'sales' cost is internalised in other forms, e.g. commission, so only a fraction gets passed on to them.
At the end of the day, these kinds of businesses will fight to find any margins possible, however small, to keep the company afloat because competition will erode these margins away through price reductions to these companies.
This is why Honey is the way it is now, because the incentives forces them to do so. It is harmful to end consumers as they have no $$ on the table to influence this large incentives.
Honey doesn't have to do this, but they think they do probably because most companies around them are doing the same, so why not? But there's examples (like x.com) to show that you CAN charge consumers directly, and they'll pay handsomely if your product is good enough.
That's why I'm starting Pence (https://pence.so), where I charge consumers directly for giving them better deals. I don't charge merchants because of long-term incentive alignment for end consumers. The supply of deals comes from marketing emails that you and I receive, and these companies are sending them for almost nothing as email is a free protocol.
Feel free to challenge me, as there's obvious concerns I've anticipated for my product, but I think it's one valid way to think about this issue differently.
A lot of people purchase things through affiliate links to knowingly support the affiliate.. But if they have Honey installed it just "steals" the referral..
however they insert themselves in the checkout page and offer measly honey points in the form of cash back as a cut of the commission they'd get.
there are stand down rules in the affiliate marketing space where you're not supposed to show your popup if someone has already claimed attribution of a purchase but i've heard many extensions don't follow these well.
For the most part, it looks like consumers weren't directly harmed aside from the false promises about "finding the best deal," but consumers weren't paying anything to Honey for that promise.
The harmed parties, the referring affiliates whose links were overwritten, would have to argue that Honey, as a third party, tortiously interfered with them and the merchants paying the affiliate commissions. Third-party claims are challenging, especially when the merchants seem complicit.
Honey will likely try to cop out by claiming the affiliate only changes if the user clicks the button and thats intent.
For those curious, here is the open-code repo of all Chromium changes Brave applies. I have not read every commit myself, so any flagging would be appreciated: https://github.com/brave/brave-core
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23442027
You may also be interested in these topics:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18734999
https://davidgerard.co.uk/blockchain/2019/01/13/brave-web-br...
They've made good changes after community backlash but their core business model is mostly middle-man stuff with a splash of crypto on top. Firefox's is the Google search engine deal. Pick your poison, I guess.
Interestingly, RMN did sue over alleged IP infringement in 2018 [1]
[1] https://ia803106.us.archive.org/8/items/gov.uscourts.ded.656...
the video explains how honey has the same thing but the cut they give you seems to be tiny - like less than a dollar to users for a $30 commission for them as one example.
i dont know if this is common practice or not but i'm not a user of these extensions personally.