This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Aside from the element of deception towards their sponsored creators, I wonder if this will set precedent for what is a relatively common practice.
https://sirlinksalot.co/affiliate-hijacking/
Honey isn't the only one doing this. Brave Browser does it too:
I'm curious as to whether the industry will start moving from last-touch attribution to first-touch (or multi-touch) attribution instead.
The only reason last-touch (last affiliate link gets all the credit) is commonplace now is because it's easy to implement. No need for long-term tracking. What the industry really wants is either first-touch (first affiliate link or ad you click gets the credit) or multi-touch (the payment is split between every affiliate), depending on who you ask.
One upon a time, websites had actually useful coupons and RetailMeNot was created by the people who made BugMeNot and it was great, but more and more websites caught on and RetailMeNot was bought out to the tune of $300 million.
Then everything went to shit.
I miss them when they were good and effective. Like Groupon.
They all got enshittified and overrun by people trying to exploit the userbase for clicks.
The fact that BugMeNot and RetailMeNot grew so huge is interesting. They were created by two Australians, and for a while were only popular in Australia.
I'm struggling to understand how everyone thought Honey made money. I have assumed from the first time I saw an ad for them that this is how they operate. It's not like it's difficult to prove or disprove either.
Well that's just because your are mommy's smart boy. You're just so much smarter than all the other little boys.
Thank you.
I'm so, so sick of these comments every time some shady shit is uncovered. "How could no one else see this, you're all so stupid, I knew from the very first ad!"
Yes yes, you're mommy's special little genius, despite conspicuously absent comments from that time...
Affiliate links and coupons should be banned.. Artificially inflating prices so that some users can add a code to get a discount. Huge in antics for years, but growing rapidly in Europe for the last 10.
Can someone ELI5 what honey was actually doing?
Using browser exploits to steal commissions from affiliate links without even the user knowing. Let’s say you follow an affiliate link to a product and you go to checkout. When Honey pops up and tells you either that it found you a discount (or even if it pops up to tell you it didn’t find you anything) it secretly opens a new tab to the page which replaces the cookie in the browser that contains the code that identifies who to give the commission to. Instead of the person who gave you the link getting their commission, Honey gets it instead.
Then if you used PayPal checkout, they would also “find” you discounts but swap them out with lower ones and pocket the difference. For example you buy something for $10 and they find a 30% off coupon, but tell you it’s a 10% off coupon. You go to checkout with PayPal and they charge your card $9 but only pay the merchant $7 and pocket the other $2.
Everyone else is only talking about the scummy affiliate revenue stealing, but that's been public info for a while.
The more alarming stuff is that they partner with businesses to manage the coupon codes shown on Honey. If a business doesn't want consumers to have discounts below a certain percentage, they can remove those coupons from Honey. This means that Honey no longer does the thing that it's advertised to do, and they're getting paid affiliate revenue after lying to consumers.
Here's the best way I've seen it illustrated:
Imagine walking into a physical retail store, something like Best Buy. You want to buy a TV. A blue shit salesman talks to you for awhile, helping you pick out the TV you want with the features you like. He says "Okay, so take this slip to the register, pay for it there and they'll bring out the TV to your car." The slip has the salesman's name on it so he gets a commission on the sale.
On your way to the register, a slimy guy in a suit says "Hey let me see that sales ticket, maybe I've got a coupon for that TV, save you some money." So you hand him the sales slip, he says "Yeah, here's one for $2 off on this $900 television." And he hands you that coupon plus a sales ticket...not the original one, another one with HIS name on it instead of the salesman. The slimy guy in the suit is stealing the salesman's commission.
Now imagine doing this with software on the internet and you've got a class action lawsuit from Legal Eagle.
They'd replace affiliate link cookies with their own. So if you're watching a makeup tutorial and you use their referral code but then use Honey to look for deals, Honey takes the commission instead of the person actually doing the work.
It's like if the finance person at a car lot decided to take everyone's commissions because they touched the paperwork last.
Will Barry B. Benson bee involved?
There's some buzz around it, yeah
