8 ms·

I'm surprised over the Honey blowback, how else did people think they made their money?

• leosanchez 2y ago
  > how else did people think they made their money? I don't think anyone ever thought to research / investigate how Honey made their money until recently.
• mrweasel 2y ago
  In hindsight it's obvious that something was going on, but you could say the same for a company like Uber. For some companies we think they make their money on ads or service, but they don't, it's VC funding. Only later are they planing to make a profit. The surprise for people most likely wasn't that Honey would have to make money on some weird side hustle, the surprise was that they'd steal from their partners.
• Hikikomori 2y ago
  It wasn't clear that they always replaced the affiliate any time someone clicked (did they even need to click before?) Honeys popup, even if they didn't find any deals. Then stores could partner with Honey and set it up so valid codes wouldn't be "found" by Honey or the store would allow them to find a 5% code even if a better one was available.
• mrguyorama 2y ago
  I thought they used their extension to improve advertising tracking and selling that data. Hell, they even could have been an old style "we will burn $100 million to acquire a bunch of customers and then do dumb customer milking strategies" business like nearly ever single other business youtubers advertise. I did NOT think they purposely, aggressively, stole affiliate attribution from advertisers while pretending to look for coupon codes that never existed or even ignoring actual coupon codes on purpose. Most people are not familiar with affiliate marketing even existing, how much of a bubble are you in that this SPECIFIC business strategy is surprising to people confuses you?