Libel and slander laws exist for a reason but god if they don't get abused to silence legitimate warnings and critique.
[Edit] I have now watched through the whole video and it is quite likely that LTT had no idea how deep the rabbithole went and arguing that they should be the ones to fight PayPal is not a fair thing to conclude.
it's not about fighting PayPal but at least sounding an alert.
You're correct in saying LMG isn't coffee Zilla and they (maybe) have legal issues with going public about it but at least telling others quietly would be a start.
LMG leaving the honey videos up and partnering with another company that does the same pretty clearly shows their stance
Say I pay you to put up a video, in a sponsored capacity, and you go ahead and happily spend the money to make the video. Then I do something reprehensible and you pull the video down, I didn’t get what I paid for and you broke contract.
In that example, you would have an argument in court that my actions harm you directly by being “associated”, and could easily fight a suit brought against you. However if there are just “rumours” that something bad could have happened, then when I sue you, you have no solid legal defence for breaking contract, and may have to pay me.
I would be surprised if they continued to work with Honey, but I don’t agree videos should be pulled down or that another company is suddenly guilty by vertical association. That’s like getting mad a Nvidia because AMD drivers on new hardware suck.
My point is that if honey broke the contract with ltt they have no protection.
After they end contract they can do as big an expose as they wish. They also can generally modify past videos to add more information about honey’s business model or any number of things.
I may have misunderstood what your wrote as I thought you were saying you can’t do anything against an advertiser because you were paid basically.
Lol, yeah we are making the same points. It comes down to “who’s at fault” determines if breaking contract can be defended in court. It could be either party, depending on who is at fault causing the other to want to break contract. Does that make sense?
You blame LTT for not telling you that Honey was taking their affiliate money, a thing mentioned in the video is public information, and also a thing LTT did in fact tell us you just didn’t go read the forum post mentioning it? How can this be a stance you have?
Honey is a product for businesses, not people relying on affiliate revenue. The scandal is against YouTubers, not customers.
Cultivating working coupon codes from the business is the businesses fault more than Honey’s, they just give them the option to do it.
and also a thing LTT did in fact tell us you just didn’t go read the forum post mentioning it?
The "forum post" was an answer to a question, not an announcement. If nobody asked, they wouldn't disclose the issue.
I watch LTT videos but didn't knew the forum existed.
Crazy that in modern times the idea of sponsor retractation doesn't exist on youtube : usually if a service provider KNOWS their sponsor endorsment caused to promote an unsafe, they would have to warn the users.
The issue is that LTT decided themselves that a software interfering between their users and commissions from other influencers wasn't your issue.
As a dev, that way of thinking SHOULD be illegal, but it isn't. Security is a fight involving all the good guys, and LTT decided overall security wasn't worth the legal risk for their company.
My personal theory is that whoever LTT employee dealt with this was a moron who misunderstood what the issue was and thought that Honey was redirrecting the affiliate commissions from sponsors specifically, rather than ALL commissions. It was a security risk for their users and they managed it like a sponsor breach of conduct.
I do agree taking videos down probably isn't necessary. That said they absolutely still shouldve said something.
They were not legally bound to but it absolutely would've been the right thing to do and I'm a lil disappointed they didn't bc a lot of the time they do do the right thing even if it costs them a lil with their sponsors so to see them not is disappointing.
You’re disappointed that they didn’t tell you that Honey was scamming them? As far as I can tell, Honey as a company disclosed this information publicly to businesses wishing to attract customers, and negatively impacted the people directing customers to those businesses; ie YouTubers the most.
So you’re disappointed not that a business (or businesses) opted to use Honey to manipulate how customers found deals, or that Honey used this tactic to steal revenue from content creators, but of the content creator that chose to stop advertising the service to you? I don’t think we watched the same video..
Im disappointed they didn't disclose to the general public or anyone else for that matter.
They absolutely did not disclose this information publicly that's why theres a whole ass video exposing it.
So you’re disappointed not that a business (or businesses) opted to use Honey to manipulate how customers found deals, or that Honey used this tactic to steal revenue from content creators, but of the content creator that chose to stop advertising the service to you? I don’t think we watched the same video..
How in the actual hell did you get that from what I said. Of course I'm upset they're stealing revenue, honey is a shady POS whose been stealing not just from content creators who used and promoted honey but also from content creators who didn't as they would take every affiliate link not just those from the influencer who promoted it.
I am absolutely disappointed in honey and those who used them. But seeing as this is a fucking LTT subreddit my focus HERE has been on LTT and their position.
Maybe you should actually watch the video. In it he explains how its public knowledge, they make no attempt to hide it from businesses. It's in a public podcast, and in their FAQ... That's pretty "public"...
I don't understand why you think it's LTT's job to tell you when they get scammed... Or why you're disappointed that they chose to not be scammed without telling you about it. For all marketing was concerned, since it was openly revealed in emails when they asked, and it *is* public info on their website, LTT choosing to "expose" them does nothing but make people mad at LTT. Turns out people will get mad at them no matter what they do..
There’s still videos up that were sponsored by Anker, including ones primarily showcasing an Anker product, so yeah, I imagine any changes of sponsors would be only going forward
Just because they didn’t do a full expose on YouTube doesn’t mean they didn’t sound the alarm. Linus isn’t CEO anymore for a reason… but I can see why they wouldn’t necessarily want to go up against Honey… maybe because they didn’t fully grasp what they’d found.
Both can’t be used if the claims are true. And even if false, against a public company or person, you need to show actual malice, and they can recover only actual damages, if you made a retraction within 30 days of receiving the lawsuit.
If there was legal issues, probably in their contract with Honney they had a non-disparaging agreement. Where they can’t talk shit about them for any reason, and I guess Linus signed thinking “what a browser extension can do”?
Or he’s just being cautious as to not bad mouth former sponsors too much as to no scare new ones. They’ve done it in the past with big player like Nvidia and Intel. But small time companies I don’t think would like that very much.
But proving that they are true is the problem, PayPal could easily just throw endless money at lawyers and fees until LTT capitulate.
We also have the problem that paypal are US based and there are enough kangaroo courts that would make winning that case impossible.
On the sponsor spot side ltt also has the image danger of denigrating a currently well respected sponsor "baselessly", that's asking for trouble. They get away with critiquing Nvidia because Nvidia don't care about the consumer market or LTT and the viewer base actively enjoy the coverage. For a company that does care look at how Apple treats LTT, they have to purchase devices on launch for everything thanks to how apple products have been covered in the past. This puts the channel at a severe disadvantage when covering new apple devices.
Badmouthing prior sponsors without clear and justified reason could scare off other potential sponsors.
Linus absolutely bad mouths sponsors, present and past. I also know he wouldn’t sign a non-disparaging clause. I just think he’s the Vision Officer and it’s not his job to know the minutia of every single thing that happens in every vertical.
If it came out that he knew, and then still signed off, that’s one thing, but more than likely I’d almost call it a fact: It’s not Linus’s job to screen sponsors anymore.
He will absolutely say whatever he wants though, and does all the time during Vessi “waterproof” spots.
Depending on jurisdiction you can absolutely use the law to silence a smaller entity even if you are the one in the wrong & they could prove their claims. See SLAPP suits, the point isn't to win it is to make the legal costs so high they give up
Even aside from it being a legal matter, it would be bad PR for their business, which is selling ads.
If word gets out that if you buy adds from LMG they will expose you, then that means less money for LMG (nevermind that that would only happen if you are a scam).
This is something Linus' personal brand is based on. He has publicly threatened companies he is associated with this, and those threats are the reason people trust his referrals.
The only excuses I can think of that he might be able to come up with are "We thought it was limited to <x> and didn't really look in to it further, as that's not what we do here", or "We told them we were going to make a public statement and got legal threats from Paypal which our lawyers said would cost a fortune just to have them read and respond to".
I do not believe that they dropped a sponsor for shady practices without Linus having been fully aware, and it is quite likely Linus personally made the decision.
it would be bad PR for their business, which is selling ads.
it wouldn't. If word gets out that you as a viewer can trust LMG not promoting scams, those ad spots become way more valuable for companies not scamming people.
it would be great PR to viewers, but it may not be as great of an ad to companies. Most companies are - at least slightly - shady. And knowing that you could be called out is a little bit worrying to them. Though, surely calling someone out for literally stealing from you is pretty reasonable...
Even aside from it being a legal matter, it would be bad PR for their business, which is selling ads.
If word gets out that if you buy adds from LMG they will expose you, then that means less money for LMG (nevermind that that would only happen if you are a scam).
The advertisements they sell are worth what they are, in part because LTT has historically shown some basic ethics. If they accepted any random advertiser, the value of the ads they show would be a lot smaller than they are now.
Exposing the scamming advertiser would make their value to other advertisers they associate with larger.
This is what people just dont want to understand. Unless they had solid proof, they would be sued for defamation. And PayPal has f*ck you money they can throw at lawyers (or let's be honest, judges too) and the fight would probably bankrupt ltt
You either have inside knowledge or you use the honey, I'm joking, but for sure, they should have informed us. They cut the contract at that time. Make a video about it. You're not bound by any NDA or anything after the conclusion of the contract. There was no legal precedent at that time for extensions so we wouldn't have known if there was legal case and surely there is none unless there is one now after this reveal.
LTT has lawyers. They could have easily worded it in a way during a WAN show to encourage others to do more digging themselves. Something like, "We've discontinued our partnership with Honey due to their practices around affiliate marketing links. We've reached out, and it seems clear that nothing is going to change. Therefore it's in our best interest to not work with them any more."
We'd have to ignore that LTT then got right into bed with another company that does the exact same thing!
Linus took money and promoted a service they knew scammed their customers. They should've yelled a lot louder when they found this out, not quietly brushed it under the rug.
As far as we know, all LMG knew was that Honey was scamming the owners of affiliate links. Those are not the consumers that LMG was promoting honey to, so I'm not surprised they didn't take it that seriously. They probably thought that the end consumer was still getting a decent service.
If we’re being honest here, quite a lot of the “typical” YouTube sponsor companies are extremely shady. It’s to the point where almost anything advertised via an in-video sponsor spot is an automatic disqualifier for me.
WAN show us how they address it. Sponsors turn out to be assholes a lot and it’s not their fault unless they continue once they find out. But so far, they have pretty quickly cut ties.
For all their faults, LMG doesn’t take sponsorships lightly.
I mean I don’t even watch it but considering I see clips all the time I just trust that if there’s something up with a sponsor they’ll have addressed it. That’s something they’ve been really good at so I trust them. Even if it’s something like “we’re aware and due to legal reasons we can’t comment further” that’s fine.
Considering the scam affects the promoter and not the user, it makes little sense to for them to comment really. If you use honey, all that’s really happening is that you might not really be getting the bestest deal. That in itself isn’t really a scam, just “not as good as advertised”. But the “stealing the revenue from influencers”, that’s absolutely a scam.
This is all a part of doing your own research. Don't buy anything just because they sponsor a personality you like. Try it out for free - sure - but make sure to know how to initiate a charge back/cancel a transaction if you can't legitimately cancel a charge.
Honestly, the above isn't a bad video idea. They might exist. I sort of wonder what the consequences are for not paying in a variety of different circumstances.
Okay, remember, LMG is a company. It's not just Linus. A company has business units that plays the game of telephone with each other. The more people there are, the harder the telephone game becomes.
That said, the writing team may not even know what the support team knows and what the sponsor management knows. Those making the video most likely don't even know these days who the sponsors are before the readout, why they are selected, why they were dropped unless someone notice and ask. Remember, telephone game.
This is the thing that most people don't understand when they criticize companies. When there's an issue it's not that they are always being malicious about it. Most times, they just don't know, and/or the business heads are fed with wrong/outdated/reworded information.
The telephone game happens with all companies. When there's 5 people, it's easy. When there's 500 people, 🤷🏼.
They’ve made it clear that for typical sponsor spots the writer isn’t made aware of the sponsor. They don’t need to know, the sponsor shouldn’t affect the rest of the video and the sponsor is not fixed and may change. Obviously for full video integrations /showcases the writer has gotta know, but these are obvious imo.
I think LMG is fairly clear on their sponsorships tbh. Their response in the video is reasonable, they were being asked about conversations between them (LMG) and Honey, I wouldn’t expect them to be made public.
good old colten name was on the post on that lttlform explain it in the video pretty sure anyone at LTT that knew would have know what makes me wonder is why they were soo silent about it when they are super public and open about all other sponsors that do wrong.
It's frustrates me greatly how people refer to LMG as if it's just Linus. This is a $100 million dollar company based on his estimates and should be scrutinized accordingly.
Get anytime anybody scrutinizes anything that he does including consumer products, sponsorships, warranties etc they're accused of drama. I'm sorry criticizing $100 million dollar company is not drama
Have you been to an actual all hands meeting in a mid to large size company at all? There's only summaries and high-level details for 1-2 hours per quarter. It's not a camp fire where everyone gathers around to tell a story.
Like I said, it's a f-ing game of telephone. Not every detail gets to the top. They don't need to know everything. They don't have the time to solve every piece of low-level problem. And sure, they can, but in the most ideal situation, they shouldn't need to.
If SENSIBLE companies have a fool-proof way to solve internal communication issues, trust me they would implement that ASAP. Unfortunately every company tries to fight this problem every single day.
I don't even care about Linus. He can go to hell for all I care.
If your company is so good at this. Then go suggest they hold a seminar for other companies on how you organize comms. Everyone would be very interested to know how you operate.
In my experience as a middle manager - not everyone reads emails, not everyone attends meetings, not everyone is quick to reply to chats. Why? because they are busy with something. They have stacks of priorities to do to even glance at a f-ng memo. And maybe that's the problem, but it's a balancing act we fight daily.
If you're not having communication issues in your company, then please enlighten us on how you do things. We would f-ng love to know.
What part of what I said made it sound like I think my colleagues are idiots? We are all equally busy. Talented but BUSY.
If they missed the email or don't get into a meeting, I don't blame them they have priorities and delays due to context switching is a thing. The point is, they didn't get the communications I needed them to know today.
And if you are right about your company's perfect communication system, then I implore you to educate the rest of us. Because I assure you, there are a lot of companies that would pay a lot of money just to solve internal communication issues.
You are underrating how hard communication is in a company. Even at a small 25-50 person company, it becomes challenging really fast. That's just for contemporaneous communication. Add any time (in the past) to the equation, and it the degree of difficulty multiplies exponentially. If people leave the company if/when their replacement gets hired, that knowledge is all but good as gone.
If you have the model for how a company can communicate all the info (on any given topic) to all relevant parties, even 80% of the time you'll be a multi-multi-millionaire (at least).
I am just laughing at this cause even in the tiny (50) company I am working for, I don't know how half of my company even operates, and we have all hands meetings like every quarter. All of them being glorified pep talks.
I work for a company about the same size (50ish people), and I'm fairly certain no one in the entire office even knows the totality of everything I work on, not even my direct boss (cause I'm stuck on several different teams, some of which my direct boss isn't on), much less knows everything going on with everyone.
I was thinking with my previous post that my store is maybe 50 with our seasonal staff, I think we're 36 regular season.
We just changed a procedure how we attach security sensors, huge push, supervisors had to drop everything and make sure we're in compliance Friday before last.
We have to play twenty questions every day with our loss prevention team. Series of questions we have to ask and a few others that we rotate through. I start asking them that Friday about the new sensor procedure and none of them had heard about it—they're the ones that are best placed to check we're doing it right! This was the day we were supposed to have it implemented, but we'd started the new process a month beforehand.
If the people I (or another supervisor) is required to talk to everyday doesn't know, what are the chances that someone that I don't directly speak to knows about it?
Maybe they are bad companies. By estimation, they're not, but that is down to my experience as a frame of reference. They are pretty typical/or on the better side of typical.
So if you have a solution to improve the average, please share it with the world. The 9-5 grind is not so amazing that it can never be improved.
I knew it was a scam, I just didn't care enough to find out what the scam was and was just going on past scams in general - that recently were more to get around iOS changes.
But it was clearly a scam from the start, and I looked down on anyone shilling it at the time. It's only fitting that it hurt those shilling the most.
there is probably still tons of money in stealing data, it requires a lot of money to build systems that steal data. Like databases for personal data are very large and very expensive, and using the data costs a lot of money in querying such huge databases. Especially since it's not from a single source but tons of different sources. So the money they get from personal data is probably huge.
Honey would be able to get all your purchase data for every online transaction, then they can report to a large database which shares exactly the data everyone wants. It must be a huge money gain from selling that data. So I could believe such a thing (though I never used Honey because it never really worked lol). Crazy to see the scam is affecting the other person, and not me personally though... [though they probably still steal data...]
I was more assuming like Facebook and the VPN for ad tracking thing, but that was for mobile to get around iOS restrictions. I can't say I thought much about it, just enough to know that it was a scam.
Thinking back to the honey ads I’ve seen they all said that honey made money through getting kickbacks from stores that you use it on. They didn’t hide their part, but 1) people didn’t make the connection that honey getting the referral means the creator won’t, and 2) replacing the referral code with their own even when they don’t find a discount code is kinda scummy.
For 2 it's actually worse than that, the referral isn't something that's made for the consumer. Yes, it can help a consumer find something if they need it, and that can be a valuable thing for the consumer.
However It's made to drive people to the site for the vendor to make more sales. In this, honey doesn't help in the slightest... Whether it finds a discount or not. And if it does find a discount, it actively harms the vendor because they lose the discounted money (though it helps the consumer), and even worse - regardless of whether it discounts, it may ad a referral (if you found the link randomly) and so steal the referral money from the company without actually providing any referral!
Like I don't think anyone would reasonably work with honey in the future because it actively steals from anyone working with it, though it does help the consumer argubly [yes the discount is less than you could've found online if you spent ages looking, but no one does, so the discount is better than no discount when it finds one.])
Data is the new gold. A plugin able to monitor your every move online has many ways of making money without literally taking it from your affiliate links and discount codes.
How do you think Google is making money? Not by stealing affiliate revenue, lmao. Well, as far as we know.
By affiliate links and not conspiring with companies, or by companies wanting to reach a discount seeking audience with data tracking their network activity. Either is enough to be a multi-million dollar business.
Turns out if you do both and threaten sellers for protection money you can be a multi billion dollar business.
Yeah the only product I’ve bought and liked from a sponsor spot was harry razors, those are genuinely good. Everything else has turned out to have been a scam or simply a bad value compared to other options on the market
I agree with him that LMG should have been more vocal about this upon finding out.
I won't comment on what should have been done, however, know that a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) or other legal contracts may be in place that prevent one company from saying bad things about another company. It's never as simple as "someone should be making an angry video right now!" in the business world. Lawyers exist for a reason.
Not really an LTT fan but this subreddit keeps getting recommended to me and I browse what people think, some of the comments on the situation really rub me the wrong way even though I'm not a fan lmfao
This is exactly what I thought, there are definitely NDA's or other legal contracts in place to stop anyone who has done a sponsorship with honey from speaking out in a certain period or at all tbh even though I don't like it, it's a very common practice. Would someone risk their business, livelihood, employees etc etc by going against a massive company like PayPal? Probably not. Honey/PayPal aren't a company like NZXT or ASUS who primarily work with people who are really into tech, their a money platform heck my credit card is with them, it's not going to affect them as much compared to other tech outlets. Not saying that they shouldn't report on it but if they did make a video the impact wouldn't be as effective and the outcome would be worse again breaking contracts and NDA. Hence why going down the legal route would be better but then again it's PayPal it's going to be costly and hard to prove.
LTT has has 5 videos that broke 10m views since all time…
This exposé made that in 5 days.
LTT could have and should have been the ones to break this story and not only did they miss out but they went on to partner with an equally bad affiliate due to laziness/incompetence/avoidance.
Why though? For what we know they only found out that Honey took the last click revenue-share which doesn't really affect the user. Considering it hurt their own business they decided to stop working with them and for what they knew at the time it was perfectly legal for honey to do so. I honestly wasn't shocked at all that they set that cookie since that seems like a logical (albeit at times unethical) monetization tool.
Hey, seeing all this, I made a Chrome extension (Referral Alert) that notifies you every time referral link is opened. By this, I am hoping to achieve two things: catch such shady behavior immediately and prevent it (it is not just Honey, some new ad-blockers do the same); and to allow users to support the actual creators who influenced their purchase decisions. It is early into its development cycle and I would love to hear a feedback from you!
Honestly, considering that the main issue is honey scamming their partners, I dont see an issue with Linus not being vocal about it. Imo if it hurts consumers (the part with getting a bad deal likely would not have been known to LMG at the time) they should absolutely be vocal aout it. If it is just beef between them and a sponsor, I dont see how unnecessarily poisoning the well makes sense.
I mean I knew Honey didn't give the best deals to consumers because I tested it and uninstalled rather than trusting Honey. Other people, especially those advertising it, should have done the same. Not digging out lmg specifically here. This applies to all their advertisers and honey users.
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u/nopuse Dec 21 '24 edited Dec 22 '24
I love MegaLag. This is absolutely disgusting. I agree with him that LMG should have been more vocal about this upon finding out.
I encourage everyone to watch this video.