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.
Ironically, this is the reason LinusTechTips never did an expose video on this back when they originally learned about Honey doing this years ago - they thought "this only affects us, if we do a video on it the viewers will be like - who cares about your bottom line?"
And now on the contrary, LTT viewers are FURIOUS that they didn't expose it and flaming them in the comments of every tangentially related video...
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).
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.
I guess for creators with a much smaller merch business, affiliate links would be twice as big a portion.
MegaLag posted a VPN example, which was an edge case, but it was enough to spark outrage. Ironically, there are many YouTubers who have only Amazon affiliate links which Honey never touches.
Many YouTubers that Honey sponsored also didn't have conflicting affiliate links at the time of promotion.
Also, if you work with affiliate links, you should probably know how they work. IMO it'd be condescending if Honey tried to explain to every YouTuber how last click attribution worked.
Ah, the modern day equivalent to snake oil, where you buy a product that gives your data to a random company in a tax haven over your publicly accountable ISP.
People are hating the player when really the majority of the outrage should be pointed towards hating the game.
I mean what’s wrong with selling ball shavers, ass wipes, and fuckin’ microwave dinners? These aren’t really harmful things and they provide actual value to people.
Are you just opposed to advertising as a concept?
Those can actually be harmful things, and a LOT of media producers will advertise them as being the best thing since sliced bread (Usually having personal endorsements required in the copy).
Fortunately none of the youtubers I watched ever went full dark horse and pawned off gambling and scams, though. Closest to a scam was probably those "become a lord" sites that let you "buy a small plot of land in Ireland" or something and a tree gets planted. When the reality is you don't actually own the land through technicalities and it's questionable if the tree is even planted.
Well, for starters the actual "security" that is often promised from these services is WAY overblown. You are already very secure browsing the internet using https. The TLS standard grants a huge amount of security that doesn't allow for snooping from a MITM.
So, when they start saying "everyone needs to do this to be safe". That's simply a boldface lie.
Your security when going through a VPN is from using https. If you are unfortunate and get a less than scrupulous VPN you might end up with them adding themselves as CAs (yes, some VPNs do that). That allows them to crack and access data within the secure stream.
Most of these VPN services are also trying to get you to do DNS with their DNS servers. Again, a major potential privacy leak problem.
> That's what a security app needs to properly protect you
VPNs aren't anti-virus software and any VPN selling that should be EXTREMELY mistrusted. You are right, they can only provide that sort of service by decrypting your secure payloads. That is where all the scamminess comes into play.
Certainly not every VPN service is bad, but I'd have an inherent mistrust in one that has both a cheap fee and the seemingly endless budget to advertise everywhere on youtube. They are getting money from somewhere and I doubt it's from grandmas signing up for the service.
My impression is that it makes browsing wifi networks you don't trust safer. I just let it happen, but I have a few friends who really hate having to connect to any public wifi. That seems to track with how most of the marketing goes when it's focused more on interceptions while traveling instead of on your home network. (And yes. I'm aware this is more equivalent to adding a door lock when a competent hacker has a crowbar and a window right next to it. Sometimes it's about preventing the incompetent ones).
I didn't mean to liken it to ant-virus per se. But the concepts are the same. Anything you choose that needs elevated permissions better be something you go through a fine-toothed comb with and have a stellar reputation. But without naming names, it seems a bit overly alarmist to name all VPNs that dare advertise as scams.
>They are getting money from somewhere and I doubt it's from grandmas signing up for the service.
it may very well be that. It's the same old subscription service virtually every company in the world does. "sign on for this super cheap fee!". Then you keep it around and then normal ratea happen after X months. Then you just keep using it or even forget about it and that's easy steady revenue.
It's dishonest, but in an apathetic sort of way. Not a malicious one. The solution is simply for a consumer to actually watch their banking statements.
That's why it's problematic. Using a known-good VPN can make it safer.
However by installing some VPN software you are intentionally installing a man in the middle which you now have to trust is legit.
And the promotions tend to vastly exaggerate the risk, something NordVPN got slapped for[1].
[1]: https://www.theregister.com/2019/05/01/nordvpn_tv_ad_rapped_...
The privacy problem is most people using Google's DNS servers in the first place. A VPN is unlikely to keep your browsing history out of Google's hands when you're sending them a record of every domain you visit, when, and how often.
A VPN service is basically saying "Trust us more than you trust Google/your ISP" and that by necessity means giving them your DNS traffic as well.
> I'd have an inherent mistrust in one that has both a cheap fee and the seemingly endless budget to advertise everywhere on youtube. They are getting money from somewhere and I doubt it's from grandmas signing up for the service.
They make a lot of their money from file sharers (some of which are also grandmas). The VPN will keep your ISP off your back and the MPA/RIAA at bay. I assume most VPNs like that are being monitored (if not outright operated) by the NSA or some other three letter agency. It's fine if you're just using the VPN for regular browsing or to torrent TV shows though because they're not going to spoil their honeypot over something so trivial and the VPN's success at keeping pirates safe builds their reputation as a secure service.
Nothing is inherently wrong but I trust my ISP a lot more than some random guys in Switzerland or Israel or whatever tax haven islands they operate from. They lie about what they’re good for which is just hiding things from my ISP. The rest of the benefits are fake
Because a secret you should know about your ISPs is they really don't care (or want to care) about what you are doing with their service. They don't want to add the hardware/software it'd take to spy on your data, that's a huge cost to them with nothing but downsides.
I might distrust a large ISP more just because they have the extra cache to burn. But a smaller more regional ISP will not try and invade your privacy.
I don't really, per se. Especially in my area where they have a monopoly. But VPNs aren't advertising making your home network safer anyway.
In the US ISPs collect, monitor, and sell your browsing history. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2017/03/how-i...
I personally don't mind creators advertising VPNs, but just be honest about it. Don't pretend like it's your favourite VPN you've always used, and it's the bestest, most secure, will make you super safe..
If they'd say like, I've been paid to advertise xyz VPN, I've tried it for a few days, works as advertised. I can watch my US Netflex while traveling out of the US, or whatever. But keep in mind, instead of just your ISP knowing where you browse, now the VPN providers knows, and is probably selling your data. Like, cut the bs.
It was honestly surprising when one of my subcibed creators (around 400k subs on Youtube) talked a bit about financials and that half their revenue came from sponsors. And this was one who avoids all the typical ads. I imagine the numbers to sell out to yet another RAID ad must easily double that.
As well as just some general sentiments you see from browsing here:
- Strongly anti-copyright and seem fine completely abolishing the idea. One that would remove regulations when it comes to selliing ideas.
- Often defends the idea of private marketplaces and their cuts on developers. Which seems odd on the surface. but it makes sense when you consider it is easier to minmax for one monoplistic storefront than develop endpoints to support multiple stores. Why disrupt something you make steady income from as is?
- There's definietly underlying sentiments towards in work-related topics that come from those leading/managing companies. a stronger skew towards employee productivity and a need to aggressively weed out "low performers". A slight skew supporting business decisions like mass layoffs, even suggesting those laid off were low performers or otherwise just freeloading.
little things you catch here and there as you browse a community for years.
This site is an advertisement for YC, and was built primarily for mindshare. "Growth hacker" types that started YC and built HN and spun off Reddit don't build things "for fun" if there is profit to be made.