Honey, an extremely popular web extension (owned by PayPal) that is supposed to look for savings to apply to your online purchase, has been found to redirect any affiliate links to themselves at check out.

The way it works is like this-

Upon visiting an online retailer, Honey’s web extension will produces a small pop up at purchase, asking you to click on it so it can look for savings.

Sounds innocent enough, but once you interact with the pop up, it overrides any affiliate link that you followed to go to the site. As any affiliate link profits go by the “last click” rule, this means only Honey is recognized as promoting the sale, and they solely get payment for linking a user with the sale.

That’s nefarious enough, but also consider they have spent millions on advertising with YouTube content creators who make a healthy portion of wages off of affiliate links, meaning anyone who downloaded the Honey extension are likely redirecting profits from the content creators they support instead to Honey.


https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=Jtl0nfkOnJZTlQVo&v=4H4sScCB1cY&feature=youtu.be

Original exposé-

https://www.youtube.com/watch?si=rDlcf2ZL_QxMYIFw&v=vc4yL3YTwWk&feature=youtu.be