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Honey has now lost 4M Chrome users after shady tactics were revealed

(9to5google.com)
657 points tantalor | 1 comments | 31 Mar 25 18:28 UTC | HN request time: 0.231s | source
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jabroni_salad ◴[31 Mar 25 19:14 UTC] No.43538651[source]▶
In case you missed it, a co-founder of Honey did an AMA on this topic a few days ago.

https://old.reddit.com/r/IAmA/comments/1jlfms8/im_ryan_hudso...

I'm not a honey user but I thought this section was interesting:

> This gets a bit technical but in the video, Jonathon carefully shows you that the ‘NV_MC_LC’ cookie changes from Linus Tech Tips -> Paypal when a user engages with Honey. What he must have seen is that there is also a ‘NV_MC_FC’ cookie that stays affiliated with Linus Tech Tips and is NOT changed to Paypal. In this case LC stands for ‘last click’ and FC for ‘first click’. In the video he seems to claim that there is no first click cookie and only a last click cookie - this claim is false.

> In my DM conversation with Jonathon he claimed that he noticed the FC cookie but didn’t think it was relevant and that he was confused by it. I wonder, as an investigative journalist, did he think to ask anyone at NewEgg or the affiliate networks to explain it to him before he threw damning accusations at an industry he didn’t understand?

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cbdumas ◴[31 Mar 25 20:41 UTC] No.43539716[source]▶
I saw that and I'm not convinced this changes anything. The fact that Honey is inserting itself into the affiliate attribution chain at all when it did literally nothing is still wrong to me.
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1. kin ◴[01 Apr 25 04:46 UTC] No.43542933[source]▶
That's fair.

But consider a retailer who has budget to spend with the goal of increasing sales. Here's a study one of the largest affiliate networks did on shopping extensions - https://junction.cj.com/article/cj-demystifies-shopping-brow...

It boils down to making numbers go up. Maybe for you, Honey doesn't do much. But add Honey to the picture, and retailers are seeing an increase in sales and a decrease in cart abandonment. So you choose to partner with a coupon company and pay them commission and for some percentage of users, seeing that popup pushed them over the edge to make the purchase.

In the attribution chain, when you compare an initial referral vs. the coupon app, it's fair to say that the initial referral has more impact. So maybe you want the initial referral to take most or all of the credit. But what about when there's no referral? Doesn't the coupon app deserve to be a part of the chain if it is ultimately driving positive return?