> 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".

> 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.

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.

> 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

> 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?

Here is an article from January 2020

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-10/amazon-te...

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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.

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.

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.

> I think it is already proven that honey does not automatically show the best coupons for its users.

I think so, however I'm not sure how you would prove that they do this knowingly, mostly what's been proven are affiate link hijacks, because thats directly impacted sites.

And why would companies offer coupons, they then spend money not showing?

"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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

thanks for the explanation.

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.

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

So, no Honey didn’t disclose what people are complaining about.

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.

I would posit that the "average user" has no care about how the companies they interact with make their money. The modern world is filled with black boxes to them.

I think you’re missing the point. Honey is stealing affiliate credits from influencers who don’t have any relationship with them.

If a YouTuber posts an link with their own affiliate code and during checkout the user uses the Honey extension to look for coupons Honey steals the affiliate credit even if they don’t have a coupon the YouTuber gets nothing.

I very much agree that it's bad in this regard and potentially even illegal, I just don't think they were ever misleading about the fact that they do this.

*Even if they know there is a coupon, but are hiding it from you because of a partner relationship with the store who hasn't published any coupons to their honey admin portal.

It took LTT years to detect this behavior despite it coming up in forums and HN. They then decided to stop accepting sponsorships from them.

Sponsored ads also often boasted Honey will get you the best deal anywhere. Yet some have found them knowingly preferring their own coupons even though others users had manually entered and successfully used better coupons from elsewhere (while the extension was installed).

> Sponsored ads also often boasted Honey will get you the best deal anywhere.

I agree that this can be called misleading, or even potentially a scam.

> It took LTT years to detect this behavior despite it coming up in forums and HN.

They're well aware of how affiliate links work, so as I said above, even if they only advertised the coupon part and never the cashback part they'd have to have never bothered to visit the Honey homepage or tried it themselves. I'm sure they just determined that they'd make more revenue than the lost affiliate revenue at first and later determined they no longer would.

Just because they know how affiliate links work, would the wording on Honeys website not lead them to believe they're only being the "affiliate" if they find a deal?

How would they have detected this without doing an investigation themselves into how the tool works, and they don't seem to be the kind of company to do that kind of due diligence when accepting ad deals.

Capital one shopping (basically the same thing) definitely originates traffic, like it prompts users to go to other websites for a better deal.

>> 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.

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.

> 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.

At no point in that writeup does Honey say they use the illegal practice of cookie stuffing to 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-interne...)

Google pulls chrome extensions found to engage in cookie stuffing: https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-removes-two-chrome-ad-b...