I'm taking legal action against "the biggest scam in YouTube history." Learn more about the lawsuit here: http://honeylawsuit.com Read our Amended Complaint...
Imagine walking into a physical retail store, something like Best Buy. You want to buy a TV. A blue shit salesman talks to you for awhile, helping you pick out the TV you want with the features you like. He says “Okay, so take this slip to the register, pay for it there and they’ll bring out the TV to your car.” The slip has the salesman’s name on it so he gets a commission on the sale.
On your way to the register, a slimy guy in a suit says “Hey let me see that sales ticket, maybe I’ve got a coupon for that TV, save you some money.” So you hand him the sales slip, he says “Yeah, here’s one for $2 off on this $900 television.” And he hands you that coupon plus a sales ticket…not the original one, another one with HIS name on it instead of the salesman. The slimy guy in the suit is stealing the salesman’s commission.
Now imagine doing this with software on the internet and you’ve got a class action lawsuit from Legal Eagle.
The reason so many people are mad is sometimes the suit guy even comes back saying, sorry man didn’t find a discount, but here is your slip. Meanwhile he has changed the slip and added his name and would get the commission without doing anything.
I think the folks suing are going to be the ones whose commissions were stolen. I’m kinda hoping someone gets their head sewn to the carpet over this, it’s a very business major thing to have done.
Oh trust me, I’ve never interacted with Honey one way or another, I was one of those who went “that sounds fishy, I’m not gonna.” and I’m on team “I sentence you to fifteen years of yellow jackets.”
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.
Here’s the best way I’ve seen it illustrated:
Imagine walking into a physical retail store, something like Best Buy. You want to buy a TV. A blue shit salesman talks to you for awhile, helping you pick out the TV you want with the features you like. He says “Okay, so take this slip to the register, pay for it there and they’ll bring out the TV to your car.” The slip has the salesman’s name on it so he gets a commission on the sale.
On your way to the register, a slimy guy in a suit says “Hey let me see that sales ticket, maybe I’ve got a coupon for that TV, save you some money.” So you hand him the sales slip, he says “Yeah, here’s one for $2 off on this $900 television.” And he hands you that coupon plus a sales ticket…not the original one, another one with HIS name on it instead of the salesman. The slimy guy in the suit is stealing the salesman’s commission.
Now imagine doing this with software on the internet and you’ve got a class action lawsuit from Legal Eagle.
The reason so many people are mad is sometimes the suit guy even comes back saying, sorry man didn’t find a discount, but here is your slip. Meanwhile he has changed the slip and added his name and would get the commission without doing anything.
I think the folks suing are going to be the ones whose commissions were stolen. I’m kinda hoping someone gets their head sewn to the carpet over this, it’s a very business major thing to have done.
I’m sure, I was pointing out why even as a customer you should be mad
Oh trust me, I’ve never interacted with Honey one way or another, I was one of those who went “that sounds fishy, I’m not gonna.” and I’m on team “I sentence you to fifteen years of yellow jackets.”
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.