Why is everyone mad at the Honey App?

The Honey App just might be the biggest scam in YouTube History!

For those who don’t know, Honey is a PayPal browser extension that claims it can find you the best coupons when shopping online. After being acquired by PayPal, Honey spent their huge budget on influencer marketing. Chances are, if you know about Honey, it’s because an influencer was paid to show it to you. Honey has been sponsored in almost 5,000 videos on YouTube equaling billions of views.

And the marketing worked. Very well. Honey currently has 17 million users in the Chrome extension store… despite being exposed as a scam.

How Honey Supposedly Works:

1. You install the Honey extension into your browser.

2. When you’re making a purchase online, Honey will show you a pop-up with the “best” coupons you can use to get a discount on the purchase.

3. Applying the discount allows you to save money without manually looking for the coupon.

Basically, installing this app gives you automatic discounts when you shop online. The problem is that it might be stealing much more money than it’s saving you and this creator called it out 5 years ago…

How Honey is Scamming Big YouTubers

The Honey extension has been stealing money from the very same influencers that have been promoting it for years by re-writing their affiliate links.

An affiliate link is a unique link assigned to someone who partnered with the company offering it. When used, the link typically provides an advantage, like a 20% discount.

As most people know, many creators get paid through these affiliate links. When an influencer gives you an affiliate link to a product and you purchase the product using the link, the influencer receives a percentage of that sale. Similar to how a car salesman gets a commission from selling you a car. This is a normal practice that most people are okay with.

But Honey has turned this simple practice into something sinister.

According to research done by the YouTuber MegaLag, if you click on an affiliate link from an influencer and you have Honey installed, Honey will overwrite the affiliate link when you interact with its coupon pop-up at checkout. This link swap causes Honey to get credit for the sale instead of the influencer whose link led you there.

The simple act of interacting with Honey’s browser extension to look for a coupon undoes the influencer’s work of actually showing you the product and getting you to the website to buy it. And the worst part is that Honey doesn’t even have to find you a coupon for them to take credit for the sale.

This shady tactic takes advantage of a common practice called “Last-Click Attribution”

This practice means that the last thing you click gets the credit for the sale and therefore gets the percentage of money their affiliate link has to offer. This is tracked through internet cookies.

So even though the influencer worked hard to get you to buy from their affiliate link, Honey is the one pocketing the money. I’m sure you can imagine, influencers are extremely upset about this because it has potentially stolen millions of dollars from them over the last few years.

How Honey is Scamming You

Honey isn’t some Robin Hood story where they steal from big successful creators to find you the best deals online. Honey is stealing from you by allegedly striking deals with retailers to pick and choose which discounts they want to show you.

Honey frequently fails to find discount codes, even if a simple internet search could find you a better deal. MegaLag claims that Honey is intentionally ignoring better deals because they get paid by the sellers to.

Explained simply, let’s say a company has a 20% off coupon available that you don’t know about. You go to checkout and use Honey to search for coupons, but although Honey knows about the 20% off coupon, it only shows you a 5% off coupon. If MegaLag is correct, Honey does this because they accepted money from that company to hide the better coupon.

Ironically, Honey’s sales pitch is “If there’s a better price, we’ll find it.” Knowing they are intentionally hiding the best deals from you for some extra cash in their pockets.

What’s Next?

Many influencers, including Marques Brownlee, have already addressed the situation and asked their audience to uninstall Honey immediately. And now, Honey is supposedly being sued for their shady practices!

In my opinion, it’s a no-brainer that you should uninstall the Honey Browser extension. If not for all of the shady practices I’ve described for you in this article, then for the fact that we don’t know how Honey actually makes their money if they aren’t doing these things.

Honey is free. This means they are either doing charity work (spoiler, they are not) or they are selling your data. You can either accept Honey for what it is and continue to let it find you subpar discounts for the sake of saving time. Or, you could uninstall it using the instructions below.

How to uninstall Honey on Windows Chrome:

1. Click on the three dots icon to the right of your toolbar

2. Click More tools

3. Click Extensions

4. Click Remove under Honey

5. Click Remove again

How to uninstall Honey on Mac Chrome:

1. Click Windows

2. Click Extensions

3. Click Remove under Honey

4. Click Remove again

For other uninstall options, click here

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