[oliwarner]

LTT certainly talked about Honey replacing other discount codes in baskets potentially making a basket more expensive, and injecting their own affiliate code when no discount was available.

It was all thoroughly scummy and against the spirit of an affiliate referral.

But I don't understand why YouTubers were so surprised. This thing is clearly generating revenue to pay off all the top shelf YouTubers and it's clearly doing that by inserting affiliate codes to generate revenue. There's no ethical explanation as to where this extra saving and Honey's revenue comes from.

[ziml77]

How was it clearly doing that? I always assumed Honey's model was to sell detailed shopping information of users.

[ImPostingOnHN]

That still comports with OP's statement:

> There's no ethical explanation as to where this extra saving and Honey's revenue comes from.

[oliwarner]

It felt clear to me because that's where the money is. Even if you don't understand that, YouTubers would because that's how they paid from all their sponsored links.

I also wouldn't expect PayPal to recoup this huge marketing investment from very partial purchase data. It'd be nothing compared to what VISA and the other big card companies collect.