Honey (browser extension) f*cks over their promoters

[Upsilon]

I was just cooking breakfast and decided to play a YouTube video in the background to keep my mind busy. I chose to watch the video below, since I couldn't be bothered yesterday when I saw it in my feed. To be honest I kind of thought to myself "why should I care?" especially when seeing the title which doesn't really entice me to click.

Well I should care, if only for learning purposes, because this is nothing short of crazy.

Here's the deal:

Honey would pay influencers to promote the extension. It's a well-known fact that a lot of YouTube influencers are doing affiliate marketing. Turns out, if you have the Honey extension installed, when you go to any checkout page, Honey will try to apply a discount code. The issue comes when someone is following your affiliate link, because...

...when Honey tries to find a discount code, it also changes the cookie so that they get attributed the sale - regardless of whether they found a working code or not - despite the fact that YOU were the one to bring said person to the product. So for the next 30 days or however long the cookie stays, if that person purchases the product, Honey gets the affiliate commission, not you.

So basically, Honey has been f*cking its own promoters over for years on end. And as Coffeezilla put it in the first comment of the video "it’s stealing from the people who actually bring traffic".

Later edit: Just to put it out there, I'm 100% sure this has also affected members of this forum, given that most are or were making money from affiliate marketing and Honey has a large user base.

 

[BakerStreet]

Here is my opinion. Most people on this forum dislike my opinions, but I'm just going to state it. In my 15 or so years of business, what I've learned is that there's no protection. You need to watch out for yourself. People will betray you and take advantage of you and use you and exploit you for their own profit. You just need to be compensated enough to make it worthwhile for yourself. That is really what it is. Here's a few examples of this:

1. If you are an employee of an agency, every $1 they paid you earns them $3 at least.
2. If you own a B2B business, every dollar your client pays you earns them $10 at least -- or else they would have moved it in house to save money.
3. If you own a B2C business, every dollar you earn needs to be maximised so that you make a profit. You definitely don't want to be forced to close your doors and realised that you're left with nothing when all your employees got their fat pay checks over the years.

What does this have to do with this video? Life's unfair. No one said that life would be fair. Is Honey cheating affiliates of their income by replacing the cookie and inserting their own cookie? Definitely. What can you do about it? Nothing. That's how it is.
Complaining isn't going to give you a competitive advantage. Smart of this YouTube to expose this and he's earning a lot from it. For affiliates, if it did affect you, you'd need to change your statement from "Honey is cheating me" to "What can I do to increase my revenue?" The former is something you can't change. The latter is something you can.

 

[Upsilon]

Here is my opinion. Most people on this forum dislike my opinions, but I'm just going to state it. In my 15 or so years of business, what I've learned is that there's no protection. You need to watch out for yourself. People will betray you and take advantage of you and use you and exploit you for their own profit. You just need to be compensated enough to make it worthwhile for yourself. That is really what it is. Here's a few examples of this:

1. If you are an employee of an agency, every $1 they paid you earns them $3 at least.
2. If you own a B2B business, every dollar your client pays you earns them $10 at least -- or else they would have moved it in house to save money.
3. If you own a B2C business, every dollar you earn needs to be maximised so that you make a profit. You definitely don't want to be forced to close your doors and realised that you're left with nothing when all your employees got their fat pay checks over the years.

What does this have to do with this video? Life's unfair. No one said that life would be fair. Is Honey cheating affiliates of their income by replacing the cookie and inserting their own cookie? Definitely. What can you do about it? Nothing. That's how it is.
Complaining isn't going to give you a competitive advantage. Smart of this YouTube to expose this and he's earning a lot from it. For affiliates, if it did affect you, you'd need to change your statement from "Honey is cheating me" to "What can I do to increase my revenue?" The former is something you can't change. The latter is something you can.

Agree. That being said, this post was intended to show "news" in the industry, expose potential blind spots people might be having, show how not thinking critically can mess you up in the long run (and implicitly encourage critical thinking), and so on.

It was certainly not a topic I created to encourage victim mentality.

 

[BakerStreet]

Agree. That being said, this post was intended to show "news" in the industry, expose potential blind spots people might be having, show how not thinking critically can mess you up in the long run (and implicitly encourage critical thinking), and so on.

It was certainly not a topic I created to encourage victim mentality.

I hate these YouTubers One of my brands was "exposed" on one of these channels. The channel has over 1 million subscribers. Named my boss in the video with a clip of him. Named another guy on the video too.
Yes, we deserved it too. The product's a scam but it's a $250,000,000 a year scam and I'm getting paid by them so I love it! You gotta be either a shark or a victim. You choose! I've been a victim before and let me tell you, it is better to be a shark.

 

[CCarter]

Wait a minute, I thought everyone knew this from like 8-10+ years ago when those coupon sites where around. All those coupon sites, that some big affiliates in our world, did the exact same thing.

Consumers would Google "XYZ coupon code" and when they click on the coupon code to "apply" it, it simply changed out the old cookie for the affiliate's cookie, since it was a last cookie scenario for credit instead of first cookie, the coupon code site would be the ones getting credit.

That was literally the whole point of coupon code websites.

All Honey and these extensions/plugins did was create browser plugins of the exact mechanism and put money towards promoting their browser extensions.

Shiiiiieet... Wait till these YouTuber investigators figure out what "SEO" is.

 

[secretagentdad]

No way.
Crap head browser extensions are shavers.

The horror.

 

[eliquid]

Wait a minute, I thought everyone knew this from like 8-10+ years ago when those coupon sites where around. All those coupon sites, that some big affiliates in our world, did the exact same thing.

Consumers would Google "XYZ coupon code" and when they click on the coupon code to "apply" it, it simply changed out the old cookie for the affiliate's cookie, since it was a last cookie scenario for credit instead of first cookie, the coupon code site would be the ones getting credit.

That was literally the whole point of coupon code websites.

All Honey and these extensions/plugins did was create browser plugins of the exact mechanism and put money towards promoting their browser extensions.

Shiiiiieet... Wait till these YouTuber investigators figure out what "SEO" is.

This is exactly what I was thinking.

Nothing is new.