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Honey has now lost 4M Chrome users after shady tactics were revealed
- dang 2y agoRelated. Others? PayPal Honey extension has again "featured" flag in Chrome web store - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43298054 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43298054 - March 2025 (177 comments) LegalEagle is suing Honey [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42581108 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42581108 - Jan 2025 (10 comments) uBlock Origin GPL code being stolen by team behind Honey browser extension - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42576443 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42576443 - Jan 2025 (444 comments) Show HN: Open-source and transparent alternative to Honey - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42535274 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42535274 - Dec 2024 (10 comments) Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam [video] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42483500 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42483500 - Dec 2024 (86 comments) Amazon says browser extension Honey is a security risk, now that PayPal owns it - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016031 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22016031 - Jan 2020 (6 comments)
- magicalhippo 2y agoA couple of YouTubers I watch promoted this and given what I assumed it did, I'm surprised that's all it does. If it seems to good to be true, it probably is.
- ChocolateGod 2y agoHow did people think honey was making money? I think a lot of these YouTubers are pretending to be shocked or caught out.
- ttoinou 2y agoA comment on HN in 2019 was explaining how it works, it was accessible through a Google Search
- magicalhippo 2y agoYeah I'm torn. I do get that more income means they can invest more and thus grow, leading to more and better content. But promoting products which have such a high likelihood of being shady like this... Another one was the app or similar where you scanned your receipts and got some discounts or whatever. Obviously they only make money by selling your data, but they mention none of that during the promotion, just how easily you can save some bucks.
- xboxnolifes 2y agoI thought Honey sold consumer shopping data.
- parsimo2010 2y agoI didn't even think about how they could be making money before this came out (I wasn't a user), but I would have put my money on them harvesting your browser history and selling it to advertisers, which seems shady but is kind of normal for the web today. Affiliate link manipulation and coercing websites into paying protection money to hide lucrative coupons would have been low on my list of guesses.
- beAbU 2y agoHoney was replacing their affliate links with it's own. So these tech tubers were only really upset that Honey was stealing from /them/, they don't give a fuck about their viewers. Anyone who flogs ball shavers, ass wipes or fuckin microwave dinners don't give a shit about their viewers, and only care about their bottom lines and will shill whatever they can for the right price.
- ChocolateGod 2y ago> tech tubers were only really upset that Honey was stealing from /them/ But wasn't Honey paying them?
- QuercusMax 2y agoPaying them initially, but then if they used any affiliate links themselves, honey would rewrite those so honey would get the affiliate $$ instead of the tubers. Get paid once, then they'll steal from you indefinitely.
- dleary 2y ago> But wasn't Honey paying them? Yes, but Honey was also stealing from them. Most youtubers make a significant portion of their income via affiliate links. So, consider the following scenario. I made up these numbers, I don't know if these are accurate: Honey pays a youtuber $1k for a single ad spot. Due to that ad, many of the youtuber's audience installs the Honey extension. Afterwards, the youtuber's affiliate link income goes down by $2k/month, because all of those affiliate referrals are being stolen by Honey. Also, Honey never disclosed that they were doing this. So, of course, you can understand why the youtubers would have grievance. Pretty much nobody would ever agree to give up $2k/month of income forever to get $1k right now. (And it's probably not right now, it's probably more like 90 days when they settle their payables).
- wingworks 2y agoDamn Youtubers really make alot from affil links? I think I've only like once or twice used a link in the description. I usually don't bother, because nearly always the links in the description arn't relevant to the video. Just an ad link, and generic, my camera xyz links to some amazon page which usually out of stock/gone. I always thought Youtubers made the bulk of their money with brand deals (like Honey), and some from youtube ads + light sprinkling on top from afill links. Maybe I'm not the typical user.
- Dylan16807 2y agoI thought it gathered data and did some affiliate stuff. An honest extension could have still made piles of cash. They did not need to be so aggressive about taking affiliate revenue and they definitely did not need to lie about coupons. This was not a "too good to be true" situation.
- seb1204 2y agoNo surprise there, engagement is their base of income
- AlwaysRock 2y agoI think the shock for the youtubers was replacing their affiliate "link" (token whatever the correct term is). Everything else seemed... minor and expected. That was the one that surprised me.
- johnnyanmac 2y agopre-paypal when I used it, I thought they were simply cutting deals with the vendors as a middleman for their own affiliate links, like any other influencer would. If you can automate that process of delivering the affiliate links, then it's a big win for that plugin. I suppose post pay that they dug into darker arts, sadly.
- al_borland 2y agoI wasn't sure exactly what they were doing, and didn't care enough to look into it, but the fact that it wasn't obvious made me assume it was something shady that I wouldn't like. When I saw that they were doing, it validated my spidey-senses. A similar thing happened with Robinhood. If it's not obvious how a company is making money, and they don't explain it somewhere... I'm not interested.
- whywhywhywhy 2y agoThe YouTubers acting shocked they were promoting that and that it was taking their affiliate revenue was bizarre, said more about them and their lack of morals and responsibility than it did Honey. Maybe take some responsibility for what you promote instead of pretending you're just a leaf at the whim of the river currents.
- willy_k 2y agoSomething that has been making the sponsorship rounds now is Ground News[0] which I have found very useful with just the free tier. But given how many people I have seen sponsored by them, I wonder if there is some catch, especially because I can’t imagine that many people sign up for the paid service. I can’t think of what that catch would be though, they do not have unique access to personal data, and I haven’t seen anything that would indicate that they have any information agenda. [0] https://ground.news https://ground.news
- briffle 2y agoground.news is not a plugin to the browser though. its a web site (and app) that aggregate news from multiple sites, and let you see multiple sides to an issue. I don't pay for many apps (I usually detest subscriptions) but pay for this one.
- ThalesX 2y agoI've built a local (for my country) news aggregator that basically clusters news and summarizes them based on multiple sources and gives me the rundown of the most important things, and things that can be found between conflicting sources. It's mostly a pet project for myself as it doesn't seem to have a lot of stickyness without the clickbait. I gave the 'product' to friends and some of them told me "oh, you should do it like ground.news where I can see left, center, right". This idea turns me off so much. Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee. Just give me the information that's there in most sources and it's probably be going to be close to some objective overview of the situation.
- pixl97 2y ago> Why would I care if it's deemed left, center or right by some commitee. Because at the day information can be political. >the information that's there in most sources While I don't use ground news myself, aggregators and classifiers like them can show you when and where stories are being published in very lopsided manners. When a story is only really being published by one side you can use that as another bit of information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argument_to_moderation https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_balance
- Sophira 2y agoGiven that the original exposé was meant to be a three-part series, I'm almost certain this is not all that Honey does. The remaining parts have never been released. In January, MegaLag tweeted to explain what's been going on: https://x.com/MegaLagOfficial/status/1884576211554201671 https://x.com/MegaLagOfficial/status/1884576211554201671
- AzzyHN 2y agoI figured it just made money by tracking and selling your browsing history, it's owned by PayPal after all. I was shocked to learn about the cookie-stuffing. That's like, arguably a crime.
- pmarreck 2y ago[flagged]
- Dwedit 2y agoWhat about the Capital One extension which was doing the exact same thing?
- smitty1110 2y agoHonestly, I think they don't have many active users. They're offering me $45 to install it as of this week.
- gameshot911 2y agoThey offered us the same thing, we signed up through it, they never paid out. Uninstalled.
- barbazoo 2y agoMakes me want to switch CC every time I log in and see their dumb banner asking me to install the extension.
- thefourthchime 2y agoLikely, how else do they make money.
- AzzyHN 2y agoDo you have a source for that? I assume they just sold browsing data, since that's the easiest way to make money in this sort of space (or, I guess, used it to better figure out what kind of credit card you'd consider applying for?)
- MikeKusold 2y agoEno? Up until recently, that was the only way to generate virtual cards. It's a useful feature for retailers that are too small for me to trust their security. I guess I'll need to start using their website now that it is an option.
- aylons 2y agoDifferent extension. The Honey like one is Capital One Shopping.
- is_true 2y agoNever trust Paypal. It's simple
- ryandrake 2y agoThe whole world of affiliate marketing and lead generation seems so thoroughly and irredeemably scummy, I can't really come up with much sympathy for anyone here. It's just middlemen all the way down, and everything is more expensive because they all have their little fingers in the pie.
- sureIy 2y agoI dislike affiliate and ads just like anyone else, but without them, people just will never find your product. At some point you just have to hope some reviewer picks you up and gives you some boost, but even then how will the reviewer find you?
- fastball 2y agoThat was the promise of search engines, before SEO came along and kinda ruined that too. I suppose the ideal solution is a form of search engine that is basically magical and truly personalized. So that I could search for "most comfortable gym shorts" and the top result would be the world's most comfortable gym shorts (for my physique specifically). And if I searched for just "gym shorts", I'd be shown results in my price point which optimize for different things I care about (comfort, durability, etc). We got part way there with Amazon, but fake reviews and drop-shipping and counterfeits messed that up as well. Maybe LLMs can help us out with this is a bit, but I'm skeptical given how quickly profit-motive manages to get in the way of UX.
- dvh 2y agoAnd yet it still have "featured" flag and 4.6*
- elamje 2y agoHave 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.
- unsui 2y 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.
- chatmasta 2y agoI 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…
- dpbriggs 2y agoWhy do retailers put up with Honey? They're clearly not providing value with the attribution theft. Why give them money?
- zonkerdonker 2y agoExtortion, essentially. Honey will actually give users the largest available discount if the retailer doesn't buy into the affiliate program (i.e. the retailer loses money). If they do agree, then the retailer can limit the coupons and discount code shown to customers through Honey.
- gruez 2y agoSounds like more of an issue for the consumer than the retailer? Suppose the best coupon for a retailer is 20% off, and Honey shows that to its users. Retailers want to stem that loss, so they bribe/pay Honey, maybe 5%, to post a 10% coupon in its place. That way the store loses 15% rather than 20%. That might be bad for the consumer, if they thought they were guaranteed the "best" deal, but I'm not sure how the store has any standing to sue. If so, that would put forums like slickdeals at risk.
- ryandrake 2y agoIt seems like the whole system would be so much better without coupons. Retailers should charge a single transparent price without having everyone have to go trawling around the Internet for coupon codes which may or may not work, and then being mad because some customers found bigger coupons, which you really didn't want them to find. And other customers using coupon finders who themselves are opaque and sometimes give out good coupons and sometimes don't, and then they use the whole coupon system to do other opaque things to skim money. Good grief! The whole system seems to be set up to reward 1. middlemen and 2. customers willing to deal with a ridiculous system for a discount.
- gruez 2y ago>The whole system seems to be set up to reward [...] 2. customers willing to deal with a ridiculous system for a discount. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination#Coupons https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price_discrimination#Coupons It's unclear whether banning price discrimination as a whole is a good thing. Is it really a bad thing that people with more money pay more, and people with more time can get a discount?
- daft_pink 2y agoWhy haven’t they just been shutdown?
- aembleton 2y agoProbably still making plenty of money. Its only a 20% drop in users.
- Havoc 2y agoSurprised they didn’t just close it down frankly. It’s just a PR liability now
- pentagrama 2y agoThis represents a 20% reduction in its Chrome user base (20 to 16 million users).
- loeg 2y agoYeah, the article says that.
- skywhopper 2y agoYou’re saying this business built on scamming businesses is scamming its customers? I’m shocked, shocked.
- cyanydeez 2y agoshould we just call the Chattel and not users? They're just there to make capitalists capital.
- abrookewood 2y ago"purchased by PayPal in 2020 for $4 billion" ... holy hell, how is it worth that much???
- nimish 2y agoHmm maybe tricking your users into using your product is not a good way to achieve product market fit.
- ibejoeb 2y agoBut ublock, etc, is harmful...
- oivey 2y agoIt’s still shocking to me that in this whole ordeal many reviewers escaped scrutiny. Getting a cut of a sale of a product that you portray yourself as impartially reviewing is insanely immoral. Who cares if these people scammed themselves in the service of scamming me?
- pembrook 2y agoAgreed. You can't even trust Wirecutter anymore due to the incentives of affiliate revenue driven content. While everybody hates display ads, at least they are clearly ads, and aren't usually mistaken for authentic content. Affiliate marketing on the other hand...well that's the entire point! Trick people into thinking the creator has independently recommended a product because it's good, and not because they're getting paid. The content is the ad. Affiliate marketing is evolving into a giant Tax on the entire internet economy. To give you an example, in highly competitive software markets (VPNs, CRMs, Project Management, Email tools, Help Desk Software, etc) affiliate payouts reach as high as 50% of recurring revenue in perpetuity. What do you think that software would cost if it wasn't paying out 50% of revenue (not profit) to influencers and reviewers to push it on unsuspecting people? On any list of "The Best [thing] for [purpose]" appearing on Search or Youtube, it's smart to just assume it's a descending rank order of the products that offer the highest affiliate payouts. Often with the creator twisting themselves into a psychological pretzel to pretend like their "opinion" wasn't strongly influenced by the $$$.
- ChrisRR 2y agoIf people didn't realise that they were peddling something immoral then they're not to blame. They just took money to advertise something that seemed like a useful product at the time
- voxic11 2y agoop was complaining about the reviewers failure to disclose their financial conflict of interest. The problem is not that they were advertising a bad product, its that they misrepresented an advertisement as a impartial review.
- DeathArrow 2y agoDo people still use PayPal?
- aembleton 2y agoYes, I do.
- ChrisRR 2y agoThey lost me years back when they never actually seemed to have any codes anyway
- Larrikin 2y agoWhat is the alternative? Is there an open source version that is community curated?
- LeoPanthera 2y agoSyrup. https://github.com/Abdallah-Alwarawreh/Syrup https://github.com/Abdallah-Alwarawreh/Syrup
- hombre_fatal 2y agoLooks like that's a frontend for https://discountdb.ch/ https://discountdb.ch/ which is basically a https://www.retailmenot.com/ https://www.retailmenot.com/ that nobody seems to use.
- mywittyname 2y agoSigning up for stuff. Pretty much every online retailer will pay you via discount for your email address. I set up a specific junk email address for this purpose and give to every retailer I shop with for their initial x% discount, and I receive coupon codes going forward. From what I can tell, this is the best way to get discounts. Retailers are generous with people they know a lot about. The flip side is that you're going to be a target for their tricks. If you click on a link or add something to your cart, they are going to send you reminders and even more discounts to get you to buy that item. Personally, I've been happy with this setup. I only see the promo spam when I want to. And my email becomes a personalized coupon code search engine that contains much better deals than you could get by using retailmenot or similar sites.
- dceddia 2y agoYou basically also end up needing a burner phone number for these too nowadays. Feels like every one of these I’ve tried in recent months starts with “sign up for 10% off” with an email input, followed by “one more step, give us your phone number!”
- GuinansEyebrows 2y ago
- 0rzech 2y agoIt's ironic that probably the biggest victims were youtubers and other "influencers" who mindlessly promoted this extension to their viewers, for money of course.
- johnnyanmac 2y agoIt's actually a trrickle-down system. Smaller youtubers who have never heard of the extension (let alone were approached to advertise) may be hurt the most, because a larger youtuber who took the deal advertised it. e.g. a tech youtuber could be hit a lot if Linus Tech Tips advertise Honey, because they have a strong overlap in subscribers. It was something a youtuber I was subscribed to was talking about in how he was still seeing his affiliate numbers drop overthe last year or so, and it was actually putting his existing deals in danger. Then as a test after the expose, he asked a few family members who did use his links if they also installed Honey. He definitely never advertised Honey himself.
- 0rzech 2y agoHm, you actually may be right. Those, who promoted it, at least got some money back for that promotion. Others lost money without getting anything back from Honey. Damn, that's even worse.
- jjice 2y agoGenuine question I was wondering when this went down - wasn’t this completely unknown at the time? If that’s the case, I feel like I can’t blame those who promoted it. I don’t have all the info though.
- VTimofeenko 2y agoI believe there were some rumors that it was happenning, but not too public. I think I remember seeing a blogpost about Honey extension being a very bad idea from security perspective way before the public outcry and it might had mentioned the attribution(right term?) too.
- JoshTriplett 2y ago
- cyb_ 2y ago"down from its peak of 20 million."
- Melonai 2y agoimportant context! surprisingly more than i expected! 20% loss of userbase is devastating for an extension, although no doubt not enough for any long-term change in strategy... :)
- DataDive 2y agoI had the opposite reaction ... they still have 16 million users ...
- xmprt 2y agoLosing 4M is pretty significant considering that's 4M people who actively decided to uninstall something. A majority of the 16M might be dead users (installed on an old browser) or people who don't realize it's still installed but also don't interact with the extension at all.
- skyyler 2y ago>people who don't realize it's still installed but also don't interact with the extension at all. This is still making Honey money through the hijacking of affiliate links.
- echelon 2y agoThe DOJ should fine PayPal for racketeering. This seems like it should be beyond illegal and land people in jail. This extorts online businesses and steals from content creators. There is no good in this tool whatsoever. It probably tracks consumers on top of all their other shitty behavior.
- jahsome 2y ago
- jabroni_salad 2y agoIn case you missed it, a co-founder of Honey did an AMA on this topic a few days ago. https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1jlfms8/im_ryan_hudson_the_cofounder_of_honey_ama/ https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1jlfms8/im_ryan_hudso... I'm not a honey user but I thought this section was interesting: > This gets a bit technical but in the video, Jonathon carefully shows you that the ‘NV_MC_LC’ cookie changes from Linus Tech Tips -> Paypal when a user engages with Honey. What he must have seen is that there is also a ‘NV_MC_FC’ cookie that stays affiliated with Linus Tech Tips and is NOT changed to Paypal. In this case LC stands for ‘last click’ and FC for ‘first click’. In the video he seems to claim that there is no first click cookie and only a last click cookie - this claim is false. > In my DM conversation with Jonathon he claimed that he noticed the FC cookie but didn’t think it was relevant and that he was confused by it. I wonder, as an investigative journalist, did he think to ask anyone at NewEgg or the affiliate networks to explain it to him before he threw damning accusations at an industry he didn’t understand?
- jmuguy 2y agoYeah, somehow I doubt we'll ever see a follow up from MegaLag. Well except that he's probably getting sued into oblivion by Paypal for libel.
- mschuster91 2y agoSLAPP at its finest, eh. It's time libel laws get reformed, so that not only huuuuge ass international newspapers can afford to report shady shit by BigCo.
- staindk 2y agoI got a weird feeling from the MegaLag video, but overall don't think Honey are entirely in the clear either. From the AMA it seems Honey has been in the business of taking some/all affiliate revenue even in cases where it finds no coupons - sounds like the sites are fine/happy with this, but I'm sure people who post affiliate links are not.
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- NatalieKrylova 2y ago[dead]
- NatalieKrylova 2y ago[dead]
- neycoda 2y agoShady? Scammy. PayPal defends it.
- tyreu 2y ago[dead]
- aricboyer 2y ago[dead]