Now one could argue that this isn’t the influencers’ fault: They didn’t know that what they were promoting was a scam or otherwise dubious. On the other hand, the influencers apparently don’t very often engage in a process of due dilligence. Instead they often just get the pitch from the company, and then promote that pitch as if it was the truth. The consideration of “how much am I getting paid to promote this?” outweighs the consideration of “what exactly am I promoting here, and is it any good?”. Thus another point of view would be that the influencers have at least a partial responsibility for their viewers getting scammed. To the best of my knowledge, only the FTX collapse caused several influencers to actually apologize, while they mostly kept silent on other scams, and just stopped promoting them further.

Thus there is some irony, others might call it karmic justice, to the latest influencer marketing scam being uncovered only now, although it has gone on for years. Because this one has a special twist: Company with dubious business practices pays influencers to promote their product, the viewers become customers of the company, but instead of scamming those customers, the company now scams the influencers. The company and product are called Honey, and it promises to be a browser extension that searches the best promo codes for everything you buy online, with a popup when you are on the buy page of an online shop. Honey is free, it sometimes actually manages to find a promo code making your purchases cheaper, and while by no means perfect nor necessarily able to find the best promo codes, the product doesn’t cause any financial loss to the customers that installed it.

Instead, it causes a financial loss to anyone involved in affiliate marketing, including many of those social media influencers that promoted Honey in the first place. Affiliate marketing is when somebody promotes a product with a link to where to buy it. That link contains information to the company selling the product which tells the seller which affiliate caused this particular sale, so that the company can then give a kickback to the promoter. Honey simply replaces that information. If you click on a link provided by an influencer to buy a product, and then interact with the Honey popup while on the purchasing webpage (even if it just to close the popup telling you that Honey didn’t find a promo code for you), the browser extension changes the affiliate link to point to Honey as the source of the sale, not the influencer who actually influenced you. So the company making the sale gives the kickback to Honey, and the influencer gets robbed of that kickback money, without being even aware of it.

Of course influencers have a variety of income streams, and some rely very little or not at all on affiliate marketing. But there are certainly some cases where an influencer lost more affiliate marketing revenue to Honey than he received from Honey to get his viewers to install their browser extension. They simply promoted another product without posing the relevant questions of what that product actually does, but this time it hurt them instead of their viewers. We can only hope that this story makes influencers more aware of the necessity of due dilligence before promoting a product.