I was already looking forward to the traditional end-of-the-year recap of the happenings in the world of technology and to reflect on what lies ahead, but no! Just before Christmas came the revelation of how the “free service that looks for the best discount coupons” – Honey – works. And, my friends, this is such an incredible hogwash that it immediately exploded.
The best games of this year as voted by you.
What the Honey browser add-on and “free service” actually does, which today belongs to PayPal, was revealed publicly by the Mega Lag channel in a 23-minute long video. And it is such a hit that in five days the video has collected ten million views and the number of subscribers to the channel has more than doubled from 307 thousand to 658 thousand. Be sure to watch the video because it explains in detail not only what Honey does, but also how the author figured out how to do it. And also about the fact that Linus Tech Tips already knew what he was doing four years ago, but discreetly decided to keep a low profile and not talk about it at all.
I really recommend the video to you, but for the sake of my reasoning, I’ll allow you to summarize it: Honey is a free browser extension that claims to automatically find you the best discount on selected goods, the most favorable discount coupon – and apply it to you at checkout.
Interesting, isn’t it? The free app claims to give you a discount for free, making your purchase cheaper. That’s so much friendliness, helpfulness and charity that it would perhaps surprise even Sam Bankman-Fried, the most altruistic person who founded the friendliest crypto exchange FTX.
Already at the beginning, Markiplier allegedly stopped to think that he did not understand how something like this could work, what Honey actually earns, but unfortunately he was the only one. Most influencers were happy to get paid by Honey to promote their extension – and apparently didn’t give much thought to what Honey’s business model actually looked like. It was probably one of many similar things for them, routine offers that they didn’t even think about. Penguinz0 also admitted to promoting Honey, who described that he nodded to the promotion because “he was a Honey user himself, and found it to be a simple and effective app.”
So how could it work? You’d probably guess that Honey has some sort of database of discount coupons (those are the alphanumeric strings you put in the Discount Code line). They look for the coupons themselves somewhere, either they use a web crawler for that or they have people who look for discounts for them manually. Something like that.
What Honey actually earns
But how do they make money from it? As Markiplier noted, Honey has been pouring big money into marketing—really big, millions of dollars—but someone has to pay for it in the end. But who?
In the end, it turned out that Honey works completely differently. If you click on the Honey extension while shopping at the e-shop and confirm that you want a discount, Honey will take the link you used to get to the e-shop – and change the so-called affiliate link, i.e. the information about who sent you to the e-shop.
Affiliate marketing (referral marketing) works by having an influencer introduce you to a product. When you click on his link to the e-shop, an affiliate link will be transferred, which indicates who sent you and who will receive a share of the realized business (which is typically a small percentage of the total price of the product). Depending on who sent you customers to your e-shop, you pay them an agreed share – and by monitoring this metric, you will also know which cooperation is paying off for you.
Well – and when using Honey, all this disappears. By overwriting the link, Honey claims all the reward from the link and at the same time destroys the information about who actually sent the customer to the e-shop. From my point of view, it is factually simple theft, but it seems to be treated legally by the fact that if the user actively uses Honey (if he clicks on it and confirms the discount), then the reward goes to Honey.
This is called the last click method, and it means that when you view goods on multiple influencers, the reward goes to the person you looked at last before you actually close the deal. That seems pretty logical, that is, until you install the Honey extension that tries to get you to click on it and give it a chance to track down that last click for itself.
Source: pctuning.cz
