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elamje | 11 months ago

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.

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chatmasta|11 months ago

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|11 months ago

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.

nightfly|11 months ago

Now they can just avoid paying for affiliate links for anyone who has honey installed

stevage|11 months ago

Didn't the guy that ran Skeptoid go to jail for similar?

AlexandrB|11 months ago

Do as I say not as I do.

unsui|11 months ago

> 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|11 months ago

I think it's cool in the sense that's it a cool concept for a (alleged) scam.

EGreg|11 months ago

Cool URLs dont change

miki123211|11 months ago

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|11 months ago

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 :)

paulryanrogers|11 months ago

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|11 months ago

You just named the biggest sellouts in their respective spaces. LTT in "tech" youtube and Mr Beast on youtube.

dspillett|11 months ago

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|11 months ago

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.

YuccaGloriosa|11 months ago

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...

Joel_Mckay|11 months ago

Marketers monitor the conversion rates very closely. Chances are some people caught on to the shenanigans within 24 hours, but couldn't figure out which part of the lead generation ecosystem was cheating.

What Honey did robbed content publishers of ad revenue, advertisers lead valuations, and end consumer confidence (bait-and-switch.)

I wouldn't want to be in the blast radius of that legal mess... Popcorn ready for when the judge defines the scope of who is liable =3

justinator|11 months ago

It's very hard to figure out as in many instances the affiliate link part of a link is stripped out before clicked.

There's a browser extension for that too.

echelon|11 months ago

> Cool business

Shameful parasitism. The engineers working on this garbage knew what they were doing. I'd question the ethics of anyone who worked on this.

dvektor|11 months ago

Am I the only one that detected sarcasm? (cool business)

kome|11 months ago

i think you are missing the irony.

but you are also missing the fact that the great part of the industry works in the same way: using open source stuff, in a super parasitic way, to track and control millions of users.

the average googler here is not better here.

p.s.: great nickname btw. and on point.

threeseed|11 months ago

> 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|11 months ago

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.

soulofmischief|11 months ago

I'm having a hard time understanding precisely what is cool about the business of defrauding users and creators/businesses.

anonwebguy|11 months ago

Hijacking this for visibility.

I had this idea before Honey. When we spoke to our attorney, he instantly told us "that won't fly; you'll get popped for cookie stuffing."

The adware world had been doing similar things forever - injecting fake results into Google, taking over default home pages to show Google look-alikes.

When Honey launched on Reddit and got their first user bump, I started building our prototype. While digging deeper, you discover Honey injects JavaScript from their API, which violates extension store TOS, yet somehow this flies.

Fast forward, they hire the CEO of Commission Junction (CJ) as their CFO and everything becomes gravy.

Try to get offers via CJ, you won't get a response. All affiliate networks (CJ, Rakuten/LinkShare, etc.) have "stand down" policies in their contracts. You're supposed to detect when someone takes action like clicking a coupon site link and "stand down." Honey never did this. We had to demonstrate it was happening, but bring it up to CJ and they won't care.

It's regulatory capture of a borderline illegal business.

All cited studies came from RetailMeNot (since taken down). They claim customers abandon carts for coupons. Sure, some do, but those people will probably convert anyway.

Today, coupons are dying. We're in the world of personalized offers. Most coupon codes don't exist anymore - they're offer links. These systems try to "find you a coupon" which isn't real.

You're not supposed to share personalized coupons. These systems capture your coupons and add them to their list, but they almost never work.

I'd never try this business again. It's dishonest and terrible.

Fun fact: Much of this goes back to adware/search XML feeds from parking pages. IAC had a division called Mindspark Interactive Network (recently closed) - their adware division generating insane profit through Pay-Per-Download scam browser extensions tricking your grandfather, hijacking affiliate link clicks, same playbook.

The affiliate networks don't care as long as referrers look like they match approved pages.

This industry needs to die.

mbirth|11 months ago

> I had this idea before Honey

AdBlock Plus also had this idea back in 2012/2013.

Here’s a (German) article about this:

https://web.archive.org/web/20220817235820/https://www.mobil...

Near the end he mentions the typoRules.js, rules.json, urlfixer stuff and Yieldkit. Apparently, whenever you’ve mis-typed a URL to e.g. amazon, it auto-corrected it and added their own affiliate id (which was then valid for 30 days). And the feature only needed very few changes to get applied even to correct links.