Like many of you YouTube natives out there, I awoke several weeks ago to an image of Mr Beast, MKBHD, Mark Rober, Linus Sebastian and Aaron from Mrwhostheboss next to each other with ghostly white eyes. Above them sat a comical version of the ‘Honey’ logo with devil’s horns and strings reaching down to all of them, seemingly controlling them like puppets.
This is nothing new in the world of YouTube ‘clickbait’ thumbnails and so I, like most, ignored it and went to my usual subscriptions and channels to mindlessly consume some content whilst eating a paltry evening omelette, before numbing the senses with other media formats.
Irritatingly, this thumbnail began to follow me around. Every corner of every platform I went to, it sat there, tempting me to click. I finally gave in and read the title, ‘Exposing the Honey Influencer Scam’. Ever the sceptic, I assumed it was some strange creator-reneging-on-the-deal type scenario. Perhaps Honey isn’t paying Mr Beast enough money, or perhaps they just aren’t pulling all the codes they promised, so I ignored it. Again.
A few days later, it popped up again. This time I saw it had 16m views, so I thought to myself, “Why not?” About a minute into the video, I felt waves of shock, guilt and panic. My Oura Ring fitness tracker told me my heart rate was the highest it had been all day. The guilt I felt was because this video wasn’t just another piece of clickbait, it was an expose that brought to life the reality of affiliate marketing, and in a way that the public had perhaps never considered before.
Many times, down the pub or up a mountain or playing boardgames, a friend has turned to me and said something along the lines of, “So my phone is listening to me, right? How does it know everything? You’re all tracking me.” I then sigh and decide whether I explain data-driven attribution models to this person for the next 45 minutes, or simply say something along the lines of, “Oh, it doesn’t listen to you really. If it did, we’d all be a lot richer in the advertising game. We only track what you do on websites that you willingly give your data to.”
So perhaps the keenness of the public to engage with the Honey scam story shouldn’t have surprised me. People are curious about this kind of thing. And, in fact, the video has now garnered over 16m views. Which is remarkable because it is a video essay essentially focusing on attribution of a singular marketing channel (YouTube Organic). Who’d’ve thought 16m people would want to watch that?
Megalag, a popular YouTube investigator and creator has built a full investigation into how one of the most common and popular YouTube extensions in the world has managed to scam YouTubers and consumers alike through a mix of attribution stealing and coupon fraud.
The reason I felt guilt is that this, sadly, is nothing new. Honey are not the first ‘coupon code’ attribution thief – they’re merely the first that dared to toy with content creators big enough for the public to open their eyes to the idea that something’s not right. When a brand or an advertiser is stung by a company like Honey, the world moves on, when the armies of loyal followers of creators see their idols scammed along with themselves, the world stops turning.
The truth is, I was at the heart of this nefarious industry less than ten years ago. I had a job at an affiliate-marketing app-developer marketing agency. It didn’t take me long to realise that what they did wasn’t ‘traditional’ advertising. The company essentially day-traded something called ‘super links.’ We would run thousands of ads combined into one link for our publisher partners. These links contained thousands of ads, for thousands of apps. The idea was that when a user hit a potential ad spot, our algorithm would decide which of the thousands of apps were most relevant to them, and then serve them that specific ad, dropping the cookie on the user at the same time to figure out if they had installed the app, thus giving us commission from the app company for gaining them a new user.
The ads we were making weren’t smart, creative or impactful. We dropped a cookie for every app in the super link, so if a user downloaded any of those apps within 90 days, we got a commission, regardless of whether they’d even seen ad. Big blue-chip companies were paying us commission for their installs, not knowing what activity was really driving each one.
For the past few years, the browser extension ‘Honey’ has been sponsoring YouTube creators and advertising aggressively to consumers, insisting that it’s the best thing to happen to their online shopping since PayPal. What it claims to do is scour the web for the best deals and coupons so when you’re about to check out an item on any e-commerce site, it will automatically apply the best coupon and save you money.
So, why is this all only coming out now? Maybe because this time it’s the creators getting hurt rather than big corporations. While most of these creators are to all intents and purposes big corporations themselves, they are loved by their communities. And herein lies the problem. Honey was deceiving creators and the public.
First, let’s look at how they’ve been deceiving creators. When a YouTuber puts a sponsored link in their bio, it is what’s known as an affiliate link, a link that contains UTM parameters (essentially some extra words at the end of the URL that let the company that’s sponsoring them know that the purchase came from them). It’s the second-biggest source of income for creators in the modern age, after paid partnerships and before their AdSense payments.
Now, if you have the Honey extension installed and click on, say, a screwdriver linked from a Linus Tech Tips video and want to support the creator by purchasing it, the moment you go to purchase and use Honey’s coupon scanner, Honey removes the UTM parameters from the previous link and claims commission for the purchase themselves. Creators started to lose revenue, and their sales were drying up, but no one knew why – until Megalag investigated the issue.
It goes further. When Honey partner with a brand, they show them the massive conversion figures they have and convince them to work with them on making Honey part of their marketing plan. What this means is that the brand now has the power to restrict the coupons that Honey show. So when consumers hit a site checkout and use Honey, if that site works with them, not only are the site owners getting incorrect conversion figures, but consumers are only getting the coupons that the brand wants to show to them. Where consumers think they are getting a great deal, they are only really seeing what a brand wants them to see.
These are two reasons why people are up in arms, but there’s a third reason too. We have many e-commerce clients at RBH, and we use UTM parameters and cookies to track if someone buys their products or services, with our performance completely determined by trackable conversions from our ads. What do you think happens when someone has clicked on our ad campaign, headed to one of our client’s sites and then used Honey? The same. Damn. Thing. Our clients see ‘not set’ if they don’t work with Honey as the source of a conversion, or they see ‘Honey’ if they do. Then, when our monthly reporting meeting comes around and we see their conversions are the same, but they aren’t coming from advertising channels, who is to blame? Until now, it’s been us.
Will this practice finally fall by the wayside? Will companies stop trying to claim they made a sale? Will coupon codes die? Affiliate marketing? I doubt it greatly, but with Google doing a 180 on removing cookies online (now convinced that was a complete PR tactic), there will, I suspect, always be those companies trying to make a quick buck and taking away from the hard work of real people, content creators or advertising agencies convincing you to buy.
