Honey has now lost 4M Chrome users after shady tactics were revealed
321 comments
·March 31, 2025elamje
Have a friend high up at one of the “Big 3” in this space.
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.
chatmasta
I remember when this was called cookie stuffing, and eBay even sent a guy to jail for doing it with their affiliate program. That’s the same eBay that owned PayPal, which now owns Honey…
kevin_thibedeau
It's totally different you see. This time the fraud was done by a faceless corporation maximizing shareholder returns so this is just an exercise in free speech by an immortal, in the same vein as running an unlicensed lottery.
SamuelAdams
Kind of like how most spyware is now called “employee monitoring tools”. This stuff used to be frowned upon but now I guess the narrative has changed.
maximus-decimus
Considering eBay also had management that harassed people by mailing them live spiders and dead pig fetuses... https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/ebay-pay-3-million-empl...
gorgoiler
Aside, but NBC’s website is way better executed than I was expecting.
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?
chris_wot
Wow, the former Senior Director of Safety and Security was sent to prison for 57 months! That's some great work by eBay.
https://www.justice.gov/usao-ma/pr/final-defendant-ebay-cybe...
cyral
Interesting, I found an article about it: https://www.businessinsider.com/shawn-hogan-sentenced-in-eba...
chatmasta
Yeah he was also the owner of DigitalPoint if anyone remembers that forum and era.
nightfly
Now they can just avoid paying for affiliate links for anyone who has honey installed
stevage
Didn't the guy that ran Skeptoid go to jail for similar?
nadir_ishiguro
I'm sorry what? Skeptoid the podcast?
Edit: Yes. In 2014. How did I miss that? Used to listen to that podcast, though probably stopped before that.
unsui
> Cool business
No it isn't. It's predatory (actually, parasitic) by its very nature.
I'm all for innovation, but that's just not cool.
catigula
I think it's cool in the sense that's it a cool concept for a (alleged) scam.
EGreg
Cool URLs dont change
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miki123211
Now what I'd love is an extension that would inject a person of my choosing as the last click.
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.
EGreg
I always found Amazon Smile weird. Why not just donate, why have people jump through hoops just to prove that you should donate? So you look good but dont spend much money to do it due to user laziness. Ah… got it :)
eru
Well, it's no less weird that store running a promotion saying 'If you buy item X today, we will donate one dollar of the proceeds to charity Y.'
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.)
paulryanrogers
Shame so many creators took the Honey paycheck, even while Honey was taking money out of their pocket by stealing affiliate links. I guess few really vet their sponsors. Not even LTT or MrBeast!
pclmulqdq
You just named the biggest sellouts in their respective spaces. LTT in "tech" youtube and Mr Beast on youtube.
dspillett
LTT did eventually vet what was going on and spot the problem, but didn't have the morals to let anyone else know about the scam. And has since played the victim card (“Mommy, they are saying a nasty thing about us!” and “Other people had the same lack of morals too, why are you picking on us?”) having been called out for not warning others out there that they were being scammed.
cedws
BetterHelp is arguably worse. Everything I've heard about them sounds terrible, but they're all over YouTube and presumably they're getting a lot of vulnerable customers who will never receive the support they need.
The YouTubers that peddle this shit have no morals.
lbarron6868
Every single podcast I listen to is sponsored by BetterHelp, nearly all of them.
YuccaGloriosa
When I first heard all this about honey I was shocked, remembering seeing Linus plug them. Of all the people to have the potential ability to see through it. The way I see it is that anyone who sponsors things like YouTube videos as widely as they do is generally a piece of s** company. Normally up to something, that makes it worth their while to spaff money on such things. 80 quid razors, AI driven news classifiers, VPNs, meh...
floydnoel
My more general rule is that anything being advertised to me must be way overpriced or a scam, in order to pay for the expensive advertisements. I won’t buy nearly anything I see advertised. I don’t run into many ads anyway, but some always get through!
jack_pp
Why would Linus have the ability to see through it? He isn't into software, probably can't code at all. His channel is dedicated to hardware
matejn
Here I have to chime in and say that a certain YouTube razor is one of my favourite purchases ever. But I guess it's rather niche, being a double edged safety razor.
blitzar
> Of all the people to have the potential ability to see through it.
lol
soulofmischief
I'm having a hard time understanding precisely what is cool about the business of defrauding users and creators/businesses.
threeseed
> 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.
whycome
Apathy? Communications spin? Lack of technical understanding? I suspect some people installed it on a whim based on the recommendation of someone and then forgot about it.
wingworks
Well, what do the end users care. So long as they get there honey $$. Yes, sucks for the real referer, and youtube creators doing the promoting (though they probably got paid more directly from Honey to do the ad then they would've gotten from there affil links).
Though, like what was exposed, Honey does a poor job for the end user too. There are other cashback sites out there doing what Honey claims/does, but passes on more to the end user. Though they're all taking the referral $$ from the real referer, if there was one.
not_kurt_godel
Scam culture thrives on apathy and ignorance, just count this as yet another win for the bad guys who profit immensely off our increasing societal stupidity
pbreit
Dumb acquisition by PayPal. It should stick to "above board" financial services. Stuff like this erodes trust.
autoexec
Paypals entire history should tell you that they can't be trusted. https://web.archive.org/web/20170312164635/http://www.paypal...
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oivey
It’s still shocking to me that in this whole ordeal many reviewers escaped scrutiny. Getting a cut of a sale of a product that you portray yourself as impartially reviewing is insanely immoral. Who cares if these people scammed themselves in the service of scamming me?
pembrook
Agreed. You can't even trust Wirecutter anymore due to the incentives of affiliate revenue driven content.
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 $$$.
ChrisRR
If people didn't realise that they were peddling something immoral then they're not to blame. They just took money to advertise something that seemed like a useful product at the time
voxic11
op was complaining about the reviewers failure to disclose their financial conflict of interest. The problem is not that they were advertising a bad product, its that they misrepresented an advertisement as a impartial review.
dpbriggs
Why do retailers put up with Honey? They're clearly not providing value with the attribution theft. Why give them money?
zonkerdonker
Extortion, essentially. Honey will actually give users the largest available discount if the retailer doesn't buy into the affiliate program (i.e. the retailer loses money). If they do agree, then the retailer can limit the coupons and discount code shown to customers through Honey.
miki123211
And there's presumably also a profit-sharing agreement.
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.
MostlyStable
It is _maybe_ a great deal for the average consumer, who might not be putting any effort into finding deals. It's emphatically not a good deal for the (probably small) group of users who _would_ have put in the effort and found the _actual_ best deal, but trusted Honey who said they would provide the best deal and then knowingly gave worse deals (lied, potentially committed fraud?).
echelon
Sounds like the government needs to rip PayPal a new asshole.
gruez
Sounds like more of an issue for the consumer than the retailer? Suppose the best coupon for a retailer is 20% off, and Honey shows that to its users. Retailers want to stem that loss, so they bribe/pay Honey, maybe 5%, to post a 10% coupon in its place. That way the store loses 15% rather than 20%. That might be bad for the consumer, if they thought they were guaranteed the "best" deal, but I'm not sure how the store has any standing to sue. If so, that would put forums like slickdeals at risk.
ryandrake
It seems like the whole system would be so much better without coupons. 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, and then being mad because some customers found bigger coupons, which you really didn't want them to find. And other customers using coupon finders who themselves are opaque and sometimes give out good coupons and sometimes don't, and then they use the whole coupon system to do other opaque things to skim money. Good grief! The whole system seems to be set up to reward 1. middlemen and 2. customers willing to deal with a ridiculous system for a discount.
MisterSandman
I may be an idiot - wouldn’t it be cheaper to get rid of the 20% coupon code?
And if the retailer REALLY wants to keep the 20% discount for a particular use-case, make it a targeted discount for certain user accounts?
kin
This is not true. In the affiliate marketing space, Honey won many awards for being great business partners. Yes, there are examples of retailers being impacted when Honey picked up on a coupon that was not supposed to be public, but Honey always cooperated at removing such codes whether you partnered with them or not.
luckylion
Great business partner providing ... what value?
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"?
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artursapek
Retailers don’t have to honor discounts, nobody is forcing them to.
dspillett
> nobody is forcing them to
Other than fear of the court of public opinion, possibly stoked by one or more of their competitors, if they don't…
buzzerbetrayed
Why do retailers offer those discounts then? Why not deactivate them instead of allowing honey to give them to their users? Am I misunderstanding what honey does?
traes
That would mean deactivating all discounts. Honey actively scrapes for them, so as soon as a discount is available on the internet it will find it. Not an impossible solution, but not a popular one.
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.
arkh
As a not an American, I can't fathom the love for coupon you all have.
Shit system, shit value for the client, and still it looks like some people would kill for a 5% one-time discount on anything.
dspillett
> I can't fathom the love for coupon you all have.
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]
blitzar
5% one-time discount on something that has been marked up by 25%.
People will buy a thing that is 90% off reduced from $99 in preference to buying the identical thing for $5 with no discount.
kin
Retailers have budget to spend and have that spend deliver a return. It's just a simple return on investment. CJ, one of the biggest affiliate companies even encourages working with shopping extensions. https://junction.cj.com/cj-value-of-browser-extension-study-...
rs186
I find it hard to understand -- many of these retailers are struggling, and I doubt affiliate links and cash backs are the best way to spend their market money
kin
Many find it hard to understand which is why affiliate networks create studies, write articles, and post reports with results, similar to the one I posted. Retailers don't go in blind. They test partnerships and continue only if there are positive results.
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.
TheRealPomax
Except many companies came forward during the expose, explaining how honey loses them money, not makes them money.
kin
Sure, and in those cases those retailers may choose not to partner with Honey. However, Honey maintains an active partnership with quite a lot of happy retailers, even after PayPal took over.
ChrisRR
Because people will buy things if they think they're getting a bargain, even if it's a totally fake discount
lwkl
I read part of a reddit AMA with a cofounder of Honey who no longer works there. According to him honey and services like it increase the likelihood that people will complete a instead of going to a competitor.
Lknk to the AMA: https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/s/lEGdq1Sx9d
al_borland
A significant number of users will spend more if they think they're getting a deal. Without a deal, even a fake one, users will go somewhere else or spend less. Or, if they think they're saving 15% on one thing, they'll justify spending 40% more, to get more out of that 15% discount.
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.
gruez
Sounds like your ire should be directed at the retailers who created the coupons in the first place, not Honey for letting people know they exist.
al_borland
The coupon aspect is what pushes companies to sign up. Honey had a page on how to sell to companies, and it was around increased sales, and things of that nature... pretty traditional coupon stuff.
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.
Joel_Mckay
Online marketing firms already had a credibility problem long before Honey showed up.
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
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magicalhippo
A couple of YouTubers I watch promoted this and given what I assumed it did, I'm surprised that's all it does.
If it seems to good to be true, it probably is.
willy_k
Something that has been making the sponsorship rounds now is Ground News[0] which I have found very useful with just the free tier. But given how many people I have seen sponsored by them, I wonder if there is some catch, especially because I can’t imagine that many people sign up for the paid service. I can’t think of what that catch would be though, they do not have unique access to personal data, and I haven’t seen anything that would indicate that they have any information agenda.
ThalesX
I've built a local (for my country) news aggregator that basically clusters news and summarizes them based on multiple sources and gives me the rundown of the most important things, and things that can be found between conflicting sources. It's mostly a pet project for myself as it doesn't seem to have a lot of stickyness without the clickbait.
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.
pixl97
> 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.
chatmasta
Ground.news also gives the information that is present in only one side, which is just as high signal – if not higher – as showing the overlap IMO. They have a feed for “stories with equal coverage” and “stories covered mostly in left-leaning sources” and “stories covered mostly in right-leaning sources.”
quickymonster
I think you misunderstand the feature.
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.
throawayonthe
[dead]
mossTechnician
I did see one YouTuber mention Ground News: FriendlyJordies.
spauldo
Ground News sponsors a few of the people I watch. Out of the channels I watch I've probably seen them the most on Dr. Becky (an astrophysicist) and Pracical Engineering.
overfeed
> 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.
johnnyanmac
>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.
briffle
ground.news is not a plugin to the browser though. its a web site (and app) that aggregate news from multiple sites, and let you see multiple sides to an issue. I don't pay for many apps (I usually detest subscriptions) but pay for this one.
dspillett
> But given how many people I have seen sponsored by them
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”.
totallynothoney
The catch is that the premise of the service is faulty.
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.
lolinder
I've found that sponsorship quality varies dramatically by channel.
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.
Sophira
Given that the original exposé was meant to be a three-part series, I'm almost certain this is not all that Honey does.
The remaining parts have never been released. In January, MegaLag tweeted to explain what's been going on: https://x.com/MegaLagOfficial/status/1884576211554201671
ChocolateGod
How did people think honey was making money?
I think a lot of these YouTubers are pretending to be shocked or caught out.
beAbU
Honey was replacing their affliate links with it's own. So these tech tubers were only really upset that Honey was stealing from /them/, they don't give a fuck about their viewers.
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.
kalleboo
> 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...
ChocolateGod
> tech tubers were only really upset that Honey was stealing from /them/
But wasn't Honey paying them?
LPisGood
> 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?
jrflowers
Seems like a lot of people get value from ball shavers and ass wipes though
johnnyanmac
So this perspective boils down to "entrepreneurs are evil"? An interesting take to put on a site dedicated to funding entrepreneurs.
parsimo2010
I didn't even think about how they could be making money before this came out (I wasn't a user), but I would have put my money on them harvesting your browser history and selling it to advertisers, which seems shady but is kind of normal for the web today. Affiliate link manipulation and coercing websites into paying protection money to hide lucrative coupons would have been low on my list of guesses.
xboxnolifes
I thought Honey sold consumer shopping data.
ziml77
Same. It seems like very valuable data since they have access to the individual items in the carts across many sites.
overfeed
[flagged]
al_borland
I wasn't sure exactly what they were doing, and didn't care enough to look into it, but the fact that it wasn't obvious made me assume it was something shady that I wouldn't like. When I saw that they were doing, it validated my spidey-senses. A similar thing happened with Robinhood.
If it's not obvious how a company is making money, and they don't explain it somewhere... I'm not interested.
ttoinou
A comment on HN in 2019 was explaining how it works, it was accessible through a Google Search
Dylan16807
I thought it gathered data and did some affiliate stuff.
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.
whywhywhywhy
The YouTubers acting shocked they were promoting that and that it was taking their affiliate revenue was bizarre, said more about them and their lack of morals and responsibility than it did Honey. Maybe take some responsibility for what you promote instead of pretending you're just a leaf at the whim of the river currents.
Taylor_OD
I think the shock for the youtubers was replacing their affiliate "link" (token whatever the correct term is).
Everything else seemed... minor and expected. That was the one that surprised me.
AzzyHN
I figured it just made money by tracking and selling your browsing history, it's owned by PayPal after all. I was shocked to learn about the cookie-stuffing. That's like, arguably a crime.
Dwedit
What about the Capital One extension which was doing the exact same thing?
barbazoo
Makes me want to switch CC every time I log in and see their dumb banner asking me to install the extension.
MikeKusold
Eno? Up until recently, that was the only way to generate virtual cards. It's a useful feature for retailers that are too small for me to trust their security. I guess I'll need to start using their website now that it is an option.
aylons
Different extension. The Honey like one is Capital One Shopping.
AzzyHN
Do you have a source for that? I assume they just sold browsing data, since that's the easiest way to make money in this sort of space (or, I guess, used it to better figure out what kind of credit card you'd consider applying for?)
smitty1110
Honestly, I think they don't have many active users. They're offering me $45 to install it as of this week.
gameshot911
They offered us the same thing, we signed up through it, they never paid out. Uninstalled.
thefourthchime
Likely, how else do they make money.
is_true
Never trust Paypal. It's simple
ryandrake
The whole world of affiliate marketing and lead generation seems so thoroughly and irredeemably scummy, I can't really come up with much sympathy for anyone here. It's just middlemen all the way down, and everything is more expensive because they all have their little fingers in the pie.
sureIy
I dislike affiliate and ads just like anyone else, but without them, people just will never find your product. At some point you just have to hope some reviewer picks you up and gives you some boost, but even then how will the reviewer find you?
fastball
That was the promise of search engines, before SEO came along and kinda ruined that too.
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.
pentagrama
This represents a 20% reduction in its Chrome user base (20 to 16 million users).
loeg
Yeah, the article says that.
jabroni_salad
In case you missed it, a co-founder of Honey did an AMA on this topic a few days ago.
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?
cbdumas
I saw that and I'm not convinced this changes anything. The fact that Honey is inserting itself into the affiliate attribution chain at all when it did literally nothing is still wrong to me.
kin
That's fair.
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?
jahsome
There's a very reasonable argument to be made a number of shopers wouldn't convert if they didn't feel like they were getting a "deal." So honey is undeniably aiding in the sale.
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.
MostlyStable
weren't they inserting themselves even in cases where there was no available coupon? Finding the user a deal isn't "doing literally nothing", and the argument for honey inserting itself in that case is at least not crazy. But as I understand it, they inserted themselves in every case even when they very literally did nothing (no deal, nothing).
bastawhiz
The shopper feeling like they've gotten a deal is uncorrelated with whether Honey makes money from the merchants.
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.
eviks
That's how any fraud works - the mark feels like he is getting a good deal. And while the fact that there are millions of marks is an objective fact, it's not an objective indicator of the fraud being valuable to the marks.
LelouBil
I think they refer to the fact that Honey also sets itself as affiliate when not finding any code.
wavemode
You're framing this in an extremely slanted way.
> 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.
staindk
I got a weird feeling from the MegaLag video, but overall don't think Honey are entirely in the clear either. From the AMA it seems Honey has been in the business of taking some/all affiliate revenue even in cases where it finds no coupons - sounds like the sites are fine/happy with this, but I'm sure people who post affiliate links are not.
josephg
Yeah, the video wasn’t perfect. But honey is clearly a shady business. Honourable businesses don’t need to trick their customers and advertisers about how their business works. Honourable businesses don’t make an enemy of the truth.
twostorytower
It was never a secret that shopping extensions monetized through affiliate. Merchants certainly know what they’re signing up for.
layoric
This sounds like a distraction. "seems to claim that there is no first click cookie". He brought that up, it doesn't control the payout and doesn't change the result from what I understand. FC cookie is not relevant, Megalag was focusing on what was important information to impart to viewers. If they clicked on an affiliate link from their favorite creator, using Honey hijacked that action of support without disclosing anything.
jonny_eh
Why even claim last click attribution while the user is literally on the site?
charcircuit
Only a percentage of people on a site will convert. Increasing that percentage is valuable.
lozenge
How does displaying a message "Honey didn't find any discounts for your order" on the cart screen, increasing that percentage?
jmuguy
Yeah, somehow I doubt we'll ever see a follow up from MegaLag. Well except that he's probably getting sued into oblivion by Paypal for libel.
mschuster91
SLAPP at its finest, eh.
It's time libel laws get reformed, so that not only huuuuge ass international newspapers can afford to report shady shit by BigCo.
kelseydh
Last Click Attribution is the most common model for affiliate revenue, not First Click Attribution. That the First Click Attribution cookie is still being set is mostly a red herring. Most online sales have 100% of the affiliate revenue going to Last Click Attribution.
dandesim
He's blatantly ignoring that most affiliate programs only payout to the last-click. Okay...great...the first click attribution is maintained, but if there is no payout for it, then the core issue is still the issue.
kin
What is he blatantly ignoring? He's actually in a comment right above directly addressing mitigating last-click with stand-down policies.
ketau
Ryan here too - will try to respond to some of these with more info.
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.
keoneflick
Isn't the problem that none of this was transparent to the user? That honey takes affiliate commissions and MAYBE gives some of that money back to the user? That honey takes credit for the sale and MAYBE stands down in certain circumstances?
I don't think any of this is transparent to the user. That's the scam.
ketau
What would you want to see for transparency?
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?
ysavir
> 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.
ketau
Probably too complex to explain here but tldr; every cash back program is built on top of the affiliate marketing rails since Ebates started it in 1998. Same for coupon websites since those came along.
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.
ChrisRR
They lost me years back when they never actually seemed to have any codes anyway
0rzech
It's ironic that probably the biggest victims were youtubers and other "influencers" who mindlessly promoted this extension to their viewers, for money of course.
johnnyanmac
It's actually a trrickle-down system. Smaller youtubers who have never heard of the extension (let alone were approached to advertise) may be hurt the most, because a larger youtuber who took the deal advertised it. e.g. a tech youtuber could be hit a lot if Linus Tech Tips advertise Honey, because they have a strong overlap in subscribers.
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.
0rzech
Hm, you actually may be right. Those, who promoted it, at least got some money back for that promotion. Others lost money without getting anything back from Honey. Damn, that's even worse.
jjice
Genuine question I was wondering when this went down - wasn’t this completely unknown at the time? If that’s the case, I feel like I can’t blame those who promoted it. I don’t have all the info though.
kmeisthax
LTT found out about the affiliate code changes and dropped Honey as a sponsor. The problem is, when they drop a sponsor it's usually only announced on their forum page. Linus considered making a video for a wider audience but was worried he'd get shit on for bringing up an issue that technically only impacted him.
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.
lozenge
Let's be real, LTT didn't want to bite the hand that feeds him. What future sponsor would sign up if they knew LTT might make an expose about them in future for clicks.
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.
hooloovoo_zoo
It’s actually quite amusing as LTT used to have viewers bookmark their Amazon affiliate link in place of Amazon.com. Live by the sword…
JoshTriplett
> 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.
0rzech
If they didn't know how it works, then how could they promote it as an awesome tool and something good? I expect people to have some integrity, not "god money above all" mentality.
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... .
babypuncher
The problem is Honey was dishonest about how it works.
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.
VTimofeenko
I believe there were some rumors that it was happenning, but not too public.
I think I remember seeing a blogpost about Honey extension being a very bad idea from security perspective way before the public outcry and it might had mentioned the attribution(right term?) too.
pests
There is a post on here from a few years ago talking about it. When the scandal broke out people linked it but I can't find it now. We might understand how it works, being tech people, but the vast majority of people most likely have no idea.
OGWhales
It was no secret, but perhaps not well known. I was a bit surprised when I saw all the recent discussion about it blowing up as I was already aware that's how it worked, but maybe it didn't get enough attention until the right people talked about it.
Related. Others?
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)