Creators and performance marketers are split on the value of affiliate marketing. While brands find it to be a low-stakes way to test a creator’s sales conversion capabilities, social media stars often denounce the practice as an unfair and unreliable source of income.
The conflict is getting new attention in the wake of a legal battle involving PayPal Honey, a browser extension that promises to find consumers the best discount codes on the internet as they check out with online merchants.
In a typical creator affiliate marketing deal, a creator posts about a product and gets a commission if someone clicks through from their post and makes a purchase. In December, YouTuber MegaLag released a 23-minute exposé detailing how Honey’s extensive affiliate program allegedly pocketed commissions from unknowing creators, including some of its affiliate partners MrBeast, Marques Brownlee and Linus Tech Tips.
The video alleged that Honey would replace affiliate codes in URLs with its own once a consumer tasked it with finding discount codes on a checkout webpage—effectively removing evidence that a creator’s referral led to a sale while redirecting the commission to Honey. Soon after MegaLag’s video was released, other creators made videos calling Honey a scam and encouraging viewers to uninstall the software.
In his video, tech reviewer Marques Brownlee stated that creators must be “even more skeptical about the products and companies that we actually put in front of our audiences, especially if they’re going to be sponsors.”