He said on the WAN show that when they dropped Honey a few years ago, the news was going around all over creator circles and a lot of other creators dropped them then too. And they didn’t make a video because at the time only the affiliate yoinking was known, and the audience would probably call them shills for making a video about how they’re losing money due to their audience saving money.
I don’t think his defense is 100% airtight, but it’s useful context.
Linus also repeatedly says LMG is not your friend. He knows he fucks the audience over sometimes and wants to absolve himself of it but he’s got 100 people on payroll that he needs to capture the surplus labour from.
I mean, is it saving users money though? It’s not, the charge is that it’s just taking other affiliate code out of the link and replacing it with its own. And just doing it to small creators? I don’t know that much about it, maybe that last part isn’t true. But it’s not saving them money that’s the problem, but replacing affiliate links with their own. And they’re saying that it’s just that they were the “last click,” even if it was from an affiliate site. Meaning they probably put it in their code somewhere to briefly load honey looking for “deals,” meaning they were the last one to redirect the click and then they get the money.
Will be interesting to see how they were doing it.
Honey would look for coupom codes, and sometimes it would find them, it wasn’t always, but also wasn’t never, so yes, they were “saving money” for the user as far as people knew at the time. After MegaLag’s video we know that the whole “find all available and working coupons to guarantee the best deal” was horseshit, and they were in partnership with business controlling the whole thing, but back when LTT and other creators dropped Honey, that part wasn’t known yet, just that they poached affiliate links. Which is very scummy, but likely not illegal.
I dunno. Because when creators are pushing those affiliate links, they’re offering discounts. That’s why their users go there. And if honey was giving them a bigger discount, I’m sure that’s not illegal. But if it was just poaching the 10% 94 whatever the creator was already offering, giving them still 10%, but taking that “last click” because it checked?
Who knows, the company is bigger and has PayPal at its back. So might makes right in US law. I’m sure that will be the outcome. But I’ve been surprised before.
Affiliate links generally have nothing to do with discounts. Coupon codes do, and custom shop urls also often do, but I don’t think those were poached by honey, as they require manual input. Many creators just have affiliate links from amazon (for example) where they just list tools/stuff they used in their videos under the description and you can buy stuff at no extra cost and support the creator. You can also buy the same stuff for the same price by just going to Amazon, and the creator gets nothing. E.g. LTT could have a pc build video and list all the parts on newegg with their affiliate links, they don’t need any special partnership for the video, just to be part of neweggs affiliate program. This is hugely important for smaller content creators that don’t have the pull to get partnerships.
He said on the WAN show that when they dropped Honey a few years ago, the news was going around all over creator circles and a lot of other creators dropped them then too. And they didn’t make a video because at the time only the affiliate yoinking was known, and the audience would probably call them shills for making a video about how they’re losing money due to their audience saving money.
I don’t think his defense is 100% airtight, but it’s useful context.
Linus also repeatedly says LMG is not your friend. He knows he fucks the audience over sometimes and wants to absolve himself of it but he’s got 100 people on payroll that he needs to capture the surplus labour from.
I mean, is it saving users money though? It’s not, the charge is that it’s just taking other affiliate code out of the link and replacing it with its own. And just doing it to small creators? I don’t know that much about it, maybe that last part isn’t true. But it’s not saving them money that’s the problem, but replacing affiliate links with their own. And they’re saying that it’s just that they were the “last click,” even if it was from an affiliate site. Meaning they probably put it in their code somewhere to briefly load honey looking for “deals,” meaning they were the last one to redirect the click and then they get the money.
Will be interesting to see how they were doing it.
Honey would look for coupom codes, and sometimes it would find them, it wasn’t always, but also wasn’t never, so yes, they were “saving money” for the user as far as people knew at the time. After MegaLag’s video we know that the whole “find all available and working coupons to guarantee the best deal” was horseshit, and they were in partnership with business controlling the whole thing, but back when LTT and other creators dropped Honey, that part wasn’t known yet, just that they poached affiliate links. Which is very scummy, but likely not illegal.
I dunno. Because when creators are pushing those affiliate links, they’re offering discounts. That’s why their users go there. And if honey was giving them a bigger discount, I’m sure that’s not illegal. But if it was just poaching the 10% 94 whatever the creator was already offering, giving them still 10%, but taking that “last click” because it checked?
Who knows, the company is bigger and has PayPal at its back. So might makes right in US law. I’m sure that will be the outcome. But I’ve been surprised before.
Affiliate links generally have nothing to do with discounts. Coupon codes do, and custom shop urls also often do, but I don’t think those were poached by honey, as they require manual input. Many creators just have affiliate links from amazon (for example) where they just list tools/stuff they used in their videos under the description and you can buy stuff at no extra cost and support the creator. You can also buy the same stuff for the same price by just going to Amazon, and the creator gets nothing. E.g. LTT could have a pc build video and list all the parts on newegg with their affiliate links, they don’t need any special partnership for the video, just to be part of neweggs affiliate program. This is hugely important for smaller content creators that don’t have the pull to get partnerships.