Honey extension exposed as the biggest scam in YouTube history

Honey, the browser extension marketed to consumers as a solution to easily finding the best coupons on the internet for purchasing products, has been exposed by a YouTuber for conducting shady business practices, misleading customers, and swiping affiliate marketing money from partners.

The YouTube channel MegaLag recently posted a 23-minute investigation into the extremely popular browser extension, purchased by PalPal for $4 billion in 2019. The investigation implicates some of the biggest creators on YouTube, such as MrBeast, MKBHD, Linus Tech Tips, and many others, all of which have promoted Honey to their audiences for many years. MegaLag explains Honey’s nefarious business practices can be traced back to its extension, which presents itself to a user at the last phase of purchasing an item through a website.

Honey asks the user if they would like to apply the coupon codes the extension has found on the website, and after the user agrees, Honey begins “testing” the scraped coupons and adding them to the checkout. However, MegaLag discovered that if a user was carrying out a purchase through an affiliate marketing link, say through a YouTube video description which gives the creator of that YouTube video a kickback on the total purchase value of that product, Honey would covertly and unsuspectingly change the affiliate marketing link from the YouTuber’s to Honey’s own link.

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The change of this link circumvented the creator of the YouTube video from getting any reward for leading a customer to the sale of the product. This problem was discovered by Linus Tech Tips, who replied to a viewer on the LTT forums in 2022 asking if Honey was dropped as a sponsor from the channel. Colten Potter, head of business development at Linus Media Group (LMG), replied to the viewer and wrote that LMG ended its partnership with Honey after the team discovered Honey was changing LMG affiliate links to its own, even if the extension failed to find an applicable coupon code.

LMG was seemingly aware of this glaring issue and chose to move away from Honey, and yet decided not to inform the public or fellow partners of Honey’s shady business practices. MegaLag further demonstrated Honey’s processes by revealing two more methods Honey is using to abuse the “last click” in affiliate marketing, which determines if a partner is provided a commission on the sale of product. “Last click” is the agreed upon industry standard in affiliate marketing.

For more information check out the above video.

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