People are upset that:

1. Honey makes money through deals with retailers to not offer the best coupon code to the extension's users

2. Honey swaps out the referral code from the blog/video/etc. that actually referred you to the product with their own, even when they didn't find any coupon deal

Merely "Honey makes commissions from our merchant partners" is not at all a "very upfront" description of that behavior. Moreover, many of the people affected by this are reviewers/etc. who have never themselves used Honey so had no particular reason to look into how it works.

> Why would they want to pay Honey any money when Honey doesn’t originate any traffi?

Paying Honey means you can limit the discounts available through Honey, sort of like a shitty protection scheme.

Because Honey bills itself to the consumer as the be-all-end-all coupon and discount app and advertises itself as "we know ALL the coupon codes and discounts", a consumer with the Honey extension will likely not look outside of that for a discount and assume whatever they got from the extortion racket as the end customer was "the best deal".

"Earning money from affiliate links" and "stealing affiliate links" are not the same thing. There is a big range of behaviors here, and they're right at the worst end of it.

I'm surprised by how far they went, not that affiliate links were involved at all.

At no point in that writeup does Honey say they use cookie stuffing to fraudulently steal affiliate attribution when no discount code is found. This is a serious crime: people have gone to prison for cookie stuffing affiliate codes (see: https://www.justice.gov/usao-sdal/pr/cookie-stuffing-interne...)

Google removes chrome extensions cookie stuffing affiliate codes: https://www.zdnet.com/article/google-removes-two-chrome-ad-b...

> The only thing that I never understood was why brands would allow Honey to be an affiliate. Why would they want to pay Honey any money when Honey doesn’t originate any traffi?

Because Honey has leverage.

Just to provide one example, Honey can very easily hurt Amazon's bottom line by adding random affiliate codes (of independent creators) to every transaction. This wouldn't make them any money, but would bring them to the negotiating table.

Instead, Amazon can work out a deal with them where they get half the standard affiliate fee, and Amazon pockets the rest. Amazon is happy because they pay 1.5% to Honey instead of paying 3% to a different creator, Honey is happy because they get 1.5% instead of nothing, and Honey users are happy because if Honey is well-funded, they'll use some of that money on letting them find good deals online.

This is just one of the ways it could have played out; it's also possible that e.g. Honey had good access to some kind of Amazon discount codes that they kept applying too often, which Amazon didn't like, so they worked out a deal that wasn't too bad for Amazon and great for Honey.

> The only thing that I never understood was why brands would allow Honey to be an affiliate. Why would they want to pay Honey any money when Honey doesn’t originate any traffi?

One YouTube channel, theo dot gg has a conspiracy theory about it which is honey:

1. amassed a huge (rabid) user base 2. Offered "protection" to companies

The evidence presented is Amazon dot com affiliates walk on eggshells to avoid breaking Toss that Honey completely tramples on so at the very least honey is not subject to the same tos as everybody. However, Amazon dot com is very aware of honey evidenced by advisory warnings on Amazon dot com website from a few years ago.

So I think basically the strategy here was:

1. Pay a lot of money to buy a user base 2. Offer protection to stores if they do certain things 3. Deliberately don't give the best offers to users if the stores pay this protection money, wreck the store somehow(?) if they don't 4. Profit

Capital one shopping (basically the same thing) definitely originates traffic, like it prompts users to go to other websites for a better deal.

My guess to your question would be that perhaps there is the belief, or maybe data proves it factual, that when someone is considering a purchase and might be on the fence and then they see that Honey can get them a coupon or rewards points that they are then slightly more likely to go through with the purchase thinking they are getting a good deal. If data shows an increase in sales then some might consider affiliating worth it. Just my guess.

>> We earn these commissions when a member uses Honey to find available savings or to activate PayPal Rewards

Do you really think that clicking an "OK" button to dismiss a dialog after Honey doesn't find any coupons that secretly reloads the page your on and replaces the affliate cookie with its own is just "earning money from affiliate links?" That's just one of the super shady things they do.

Same with Paypal rewards. They entice users to click the rewards button to again steal the affiliate cookie, and pay them a few cents while they take tens of dollars in affiliate commision.

They literally advertise this as a feature on their home page in that they give you X% of what they earn from affiliate links. It says a lot about the influencers advertising it if they did not realise that Honey is taking their affiliate revenue while reading an ad that says they do. More realistically, most of them likely did know that this is what Honey does and determined that honey paid more than any lost revenue, but know that saying that would lead to some of this outrage being directed at them. As a bonus, by asking users to uninstall Honey they can have their money from running Honey ads previously and money from their affiliate links too. The only way I can maybe see influencers being unaware of this if if they read an ad that only talked about the coupon feature and they never bothered to even visit the Honey homepage or try it themselves, which would be a pretty bad look for them.

I also think most users that use Honey have to know that this is what it does given that, again, it's an advertised feature. I suspect most people outraged at this are people that never used the tool in the first place.

I certainly think it's a bad product as it defeats the purpose of affiliate links and reduces revenue for anyone using affiliate links for their intended purpose, but I don't think they were misleading anyone about what the product does.