this post was submitted on 03 Jan 2025
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My problem here, and I don't mean to victim blame but I don't understand why anybody thought Honey had a business model that was trustworthy. Most people would see through the slimy guy in your example, so why would they install a slimy guy in their browser? Why would people take sponsorship from a slimy guy? Why would they read our copy that tells kids to "install it on every computer in the house"?
Nobody asked themselves "How does Honey make money out of this?" because at the very least they were going to be data scraping! That much was obvious.
It's simple, Honey connects you with coupons, which drives you to store B instead of store A, and Honey makes a commission. If you follow a different affiliate link, and Honey gives you a coupon, they should share the commission with the affiliate.
That's how it should work. But instead, Honey just hijacks the commission.
That's still a shitty exploitative business model. A bit less deceptive, but that original coupon vendor is still having affiliate revenue stolen from them.
That's one way to look at it, but another is that more people would use the coupon, so the original coupon vendor makes up for lower margins with higher volume.
Honey's take should be small, since they're doing very little of the work.
I don't understand how you think the smaller coupon gets more volume. It gets no volume as the hypothetically "good honey" redirects everyone away from it.
Oh, I thought you meant original as in the one who created the coupon Honey uses.
I think every affiliate along the chain should share the affiliate cut, even if their coupon isn't the one applied, since their coupon lead to a sale. That's not how it works, but it's how it should work.
Or ideally, affiliate link revenue isn't a thing at all and instead stores just pay for ad space. That would significantly cut down on link spamming and hopefully increase the quality of reviews, since views matter more than someone finding the link.