When the Honey is too sweet to be true

Thoughts about sponsorships and economic sustainability as a creator while maintaining ethical standards.

YouTube channel Megalag published the first part of a video series about Honey and its influencer program, and various issues surrounding it:

TL;DW: Honey is an extension that supposedly helps you (for free!) to find coupon codes all over the internet automatically so when you're at the checkout page you can save some money. However, in the video it shows how Honey puts their affiliate cookie in place of any other to effectively "steal" the commission.

Additionally, apparently online shops that partner with Honey can set the coupons that Honey shows, meaning that even if a better coupon is available online, Honey doesn't apply it, even though they say they "search for every coupon on the internet". Check out the video, it's very cool.

As a customer, I had installed Honey before every once in a while, but never found much use in it;

in fact, I can't recall any time in which it found a useful code. I didn't put much thought into it and moved on.

As a creator (I do content mostly in Italian as of now) I have naturally never been approached by them, because I'm still too small of a creator to be worthwhile,
but I have received sponsorship offers that I wouldn't take and I have thought about how to approach the matter "ethically".

So, here are some considerations:

First of all, even though hindsight is 20/20, if you think about it for a bit...what's Honey's business model supposed to be?

Like, the extension is free, and if the deals are found "on the web", then how does the company earn revenue? Now, of course there may be reasonable explanations or plausible business models that don't involve "stealing" referrals,

but my broader point is that we should ask ourselves whether the service we consider has a plausible business model.

Not only because we want to avoid getting scammed, but also because we've started to see the cracks in so much of the economy of our digital ecosystem.

By that I mean that we see more and more paywalls: The Verge just started their subscription, the NYT is effectively becoming a games publisher with a newspaper attached, journalists are moving to Substack or other forms of paid subscriptions (Zeteo by Mehdi Hasan, User Mag by Taylor Lorenz, just to name a couple of the newer interesting ones).

Not only that, but apps and services are abandoning free or freemium models in favor of subscriptions.

Recently I've had one of most frustrating experiences about it with my (former) calendar app of choice, Amie: the app changed suddenly from a freemium model with subscriptions to paid subscriptions only, from one day to the next.

You simply couldn't access the app from a Mac with no warning whatsoever. I'm not that busy of a person (not in the "I have multiple meetings a day" sense, that is) so it was ok, but what if I opened the app right before a meeting and I needed some notes I put in the app?

I wrote a lengthy feedback about it:

This is not how you transition to a paid model for an app. For the past few months I have used Amie as my calendar app, both on Mac and iOS. It's a very nice app with interesting ideas (I love their split screen UI for cal and tasks!), and it was featured on The Verge by @davidpierce.xyz

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— Martino Wong (@oradecima.com) November 30, 2024 at 10:30 PM

but I haven't heard back from them.

Another example that comes to mind are some apps acquired by Bending Spoons, like Filmic Pro, a pro iPhone video app who got a huge price increase (and was simply...totally surpassed by Blackmagic Camera which is free). What irks me is that the price increase is accompanied by the options for weekly subscriptions that simply give me the ick.

So, yeah, everybody hates subscriptions, and everybody hates apps switching to subscriptions, even though...they are good? Like they actually probably are the better choice:

In our deeply twisted world, we've come to expect for apps and services that are highly valuable to us to be free, because often they have been.
Social media apps, document writing, AI chatbots, newsletters, there are prominent free options for all of these.

But we increasingly find that this expectation means that either the power that Big Tech companies have gets more and more consolidated, or that the only way for a digital business to succeed is to grow infinitely (maybe until you get acquired by a bigger company?).

When an app I love deeply or that I rely upon regularly starts offering a subscription, I'm actually a bit glad nowadays, because it gives me hope that the developers can sustainably work on it long term and make a good product.

Of course, I do suffer from subscription fatigue as well, and I totally get that this comes from a place of privilege of generally being able to afford the tools I use to work.

Which brings me back to the plausible-business-model of Honey and of online services in general, especially in the context of promoting them.

Remember when we discovered that a number of right-wing creators were unknowingly being paid by Russia? As creators, I think we need to be asking ourselves where the money comes from, and have a high-level idea of how the things we promote work.

This is not always easy; not only because it may not always be obvious if there are issues, but also because I get the struggle of needing to make content creation sustainable itself.

Personally, one of the big things that allowed me to become a creator by profession is having the privilege of not making it profitable right away. And even now, I'm lucky that I have been able to refuse a couple of wonky sponsorship offers without having it be a big issue for me, but maybe not everyone has this luxury.

I think we should treat each other with kindness, but also be conscious of the compromises we make without sweeping them under the carpet. I think we need to embrace this struggle.