Where are Mr. Beast's early sponsors now?

* Affiliate marketing attribution is understood to be imperfect, the best effort nature of it is priced in to the commissions

* Affiliate marketing uses multiple attribution strategies with varying trade-offs including coupon codes (e.g: "use code INFLUENCER at checkout for a 10% discount") vs. links ("click the link in my description") because of the imperfect nature

* Affiliate marketing is adversarial, all of these influencers have "stolen" attribution from each other

As Honey will have no problem proving:

* The advertisers (e.g: NordVPN) understand that affiliate marketing attribution is not an exact science, that n sales driven by an influencer does not translate to n affiliate commissions, and that the amount they offer to influencers per sale accounts for that

* The agencies that work on behalf of influencers to negotiate deals with advertisers understand the challenges of attribution and have negotiated based on this imperfect art of attribution

* The agencies/influencers/advertisers choose whether to engage in affiliate marketing by weighing up the benefits of being paid per sale vs. being paid per video or views

* There will be pages and pages and pages of emails within these influencer agencies where discussions have taken place on the choice to use affiliate marketing based on the audience of a video, e.g: link based affiliate marketing is less effective for an audience that watches videos on TV, vs. an audience primarily watching the video on a computer

* Honey was not receiving an equivalent rate to what the influencers were receiving, the influencers would not have earned their per sale commission x the number of sales if Honey had not captured the attribution (which demonstrates that this is all priced in)

Maybe PayPal will settle but given the harm this drama has caused to the Honey business, I doubt they have any intention of doing so.

I think the perceived difference is that influencer A or B got someone to click a link to a store while Honey used a browser extension to reset the affiliate attribution when the user was already at the store on the checkout page about to click to purchase. They didn't drive the user to the store. That's a big difference.

> The defence so many influencers employ when advertisers turn out to be doing shady things is "You can't hold me responsible! It's not my fault, how can I know what my advertisers are doing?" but as soon as an advertiser does something that harms the influencer, it's a problem?

Yes, if the damage is directed towards you then that's a case for a defence.

Inluencers are just providing advertisement space like any other media platform (TV, websites etc.). So if a sponsor bought this advertisement space and turns out to be shady, why should influencers, TVs, websites etc. be held accountable? Hasn't their reputation been damaged as well? They usually just don't go after it because it's a tough case to quantify and any legal trouble can be exceedingly tiresome.

> If Influencer A includes an affiliate link for "Expensive Camera" and Influencer B includes an affiliate link for "Cheap Toy" and you click on "Expensive Camera" then click on "Cheap Toy" and then buy the expensive camera, Influencer B is getting paid for that purchase expensive camera purchase, despite Influencer A influencing you to buy it.

It's the last click, yes. There's a difference between [A] you actively clicking an affiliate button to land on a product page and [B] you being tricked into a last button click right before checkout with the (void) promise of free coupons. You stated it perfectly, yet you don't understand the difference?

As for "Expensive Camera - Cheap Toy": What get attributes how is a technical challenge and cookie domains seem to be the solution that gets picked by the affiliate stores. I think there could be a more fine-grained solution that wouldn't be so difficult to implement, agree, but it seems like there's no work being done in this space?

Except Honey doesn't do that. Online shops pay Honey to ignore the best coupons, so that the customer will pay more than if they had looked for the coupons themselves. They run a cashback scheme that is no different than e.g. payback cards, but they deceptively fund it using affiliate marketing, meaning that the user is getting a pittance in savings in comparison to what honey gets.

Do you actually use it man? Have you actually learned anything on Brilliant?

That there's no separation anymore. YouTube added support for multiple audio tracks and since then everything goes to one channel again. The channels in other languages even redirect to the main channel.