| My prediction for the response from Honey: * Affiliate marketing attribution is understood to be imperfect, the best effort nature of it is priced in to the commissions * Affiliate marketing uses multiple attribution strategies with varying trade-offs including coupon codes (e.g: "use code INFLUENCER at checkout for a 10% discount") vs. links ("click the link in my description") because of the imperfect nature * Affiliate marketing is adversarial, all of these influencers have "stolen" attribution from each other As Honey will have no problem proving: * The advertisers (e.g: NordVPN) understand that affiliate marketing attribution is not an exact science, that n sales driven by an influencer does not translate to n affiliate commissions, and that the amount they offer to influencers per sale accounts for that * The agencies that work on behalf of influencers to negotiate deals with advertisers understand the challenges of attribution and have negotiated based on this imperfect art of attribution * The agencies/influencers/advertisers choose whether to engage in affiliate marketing by weighing up the benefits of being paid per sale vs. being paid per video or views * There will be pages and pages and pages of emails within these influencer agencies where discussions have taken place on the choice to use affiliate marketing based on the audience of a video, e.g: link based affiliate marketing is less effective for an audience that watches videos on TV, vs. an audience primarily watching the video on a computer * Honey was not receiving an equivalent rate to what the influencers were receiving, the influencers would not have earned their per sale commission x the number of sales if Honey had not captured the attribution (which demonstrates that this is all priced in) Maybe PayPal will settle but given the harm this drama has caused to the Honey business, I doubt they have any intention of doing so. |