PayPal Honey steals affiliate links and lies about finding the best coupons
PayPal Honey steals affiliate links and lies about finding the best coupons
🖕 Fuck PayPal
And fuck Linus Tech Tips for intentionally keeping quiet about this after they found out.
tl;dw:
Affiliate injection: When you click the "Find coupons" button, it will inject their affiliate cookie. This is... somewhat okay in normal circumstances, but they will overwrite other affiliates since they were the "last click." If you visit via (insert YouTuber)'s sponsorship and use a Honey coupon, it will override theirs and use Honey's. The YouTuber loses the profit they would've made and instead gives it to Paypal/Honey. It will also inject their affiliate cookie if you click find coupons and it doesn't find any, or if you click okay on their "We didn't find any coupons, but this is the best deal!" popup, despite them doing 0 work.
Misdirection: They will pop up that they found the "best deal" while intentionally leaving off higher coupon deals, if a company has a partnership with honey, they may for example have a 10% promotion running. With a honey partnership, they may ask Honey only to give users a 5% coupon and say it's the "best deal" or tell users no coupons are available despite some being available (even if added to their database), so they pay a small affiliate fee to Honey in exchange for lowering the rates they give in coupons so they can still say they are giving them, but using them as little as possible.
Honey Gold cashback: This one, in combination with the above, gives you 1 1-2% of the order, but they make substantially more than they pass to the user anyway. This one is to be expected, but it is just a reminder that they still do normal company scam stuff on top of their notable scammy practices.
1What I don't understand is why LMG kept quite about this. No matter how much PayPal paid them it wouldn't be more than how much they would be making with affiliate links also why join hands with karma which is also doing same and stealing from them.
5By now, you’ve probably heard about Honey.
Nope, I guess because my ad blockers work and I skip over in-feed ads 🤷
46A lot of podcasts plug it. I've never bothered with it.
3
Next you'll tell me penis enlargement pills don't work and my Nigerian prince isn't going to pay me back.
10If you're sitting at a poker table and you can't tell who the sucker is, it's you.
Alternately, if you look at an online service and can't tell what the product is, It's you.
55Yeah always look for where a service gets its money from before you get anything.
3
I wonder if Honey's new ad blocker Pie does things like this too.
10I mean, if these guys are willing to do morally reprehensible stuff like this, then it should just be expected that they would do the same kind of thing for whatever new products they develop.
7Exposing the "PIE" Influencer Disaster - (Same Developers as HONEY)
After an excellent video highlighting the predatory practices of "Honey" (made by "MegaLag")... I wanted to add my voice, and talk about an offshoot of that same company (with the same founders, staff, and apparent business model) that seems to go even one step further, and position itself as a detriment to the entire social media Creator ecosystem.
After Honey was successful in tricking almost all of YouTubes largest influencers (from Mr Beast, all the way to MoistCritikal) it was then seemingly acquired by PayPal, with this new project from its founder popping up, as we are given a rare opportunity to be pro-active in the pursuit of shutting down predatory practices on YouTube... before they officially take root.
14
That's scummy, but I don't care if your ads for amazon on your blog or whatever don't work. Not my problem.
10Yeah I don't understand the faux outrage here, but maybe that's because I'm not in a parasocial relationship with these influencers.
I always wondered how Honey made any money, so this answers that question and is actually a pretty ingenious (if somewhat underhanded) mechanism.
3If you partnered with them as a sponsor and they took your commission money and paid you using some of the money that you would have otherwise gotten anyway, you'd probably be angry.
2
Yeah I deleted honey a while ago just because it was owned by PayPal and it probably sells all your data. Just one extra reason to add to the pile.
The idea of honey is good though any possibilities of an open source version?
1Okay but why fuck PayPal.
4Because they paid 4 billion to a fraud company lol. Also PayPal in general is pretty damn scummy.
1They own Honey
12But I imagine they have been doing this even before they got bought by them
6
Maybe start at the trustpilot reviews.
1
Almost as scummy as the concept of a YouTuber using affiliate links.
1