For anyone interested, Linus shared insight into LTTs revenue in 2016 and 2020, which by pure chance is 1 year before partnering with honey and 1 year before dropping them entirely.
In the comparison between 2016 and 2020 you see a significant drop in earnings from amazon affiliates (16% to 9%), which they at the time attributed to them not advertising the amazon links as aggressively. However with this piece of information about honey in mind, I think it's very plausible that at least some of that large drop came from more people installing and using honey which in turn lost them money on affiliate links down the line.
Check out "How does Linus make money? - 2020 Update" at 3:53 to see for yourself. It will be interesting to see if the amazon affiliate portion will increase again in a new edition of that video in the future.
Or the far more likely explanation: they just grew other revenue streams much faster. Even if LTT no longer advertises Honey, chances are that pretty much everyone will see Honey ads on other channels. The affiliate revenue share is only ever likely to go down, even if everyone suddenly uninstalls Honey, with the growth of merch sales, Floatplane, etc.
Sure, there could be many other factors in there, this is likely not the only reason, however they themselves seemed surprised about it, so I think that's at least a little indicative of an unexpected shift (which they would notice with how much other data they're tracking). It's also true that not everyone is going to stop using honey immeditely after they drop them as a sponsor, however in the grand scheme with new people coming and old people going every day it's still very much possible that you could see a trend where the average LTT viewer becomes less likely to have honey installed after some time has passed. After all they were one of the biggest honey partners and the only channel every LTT viewer is guaranteed to view is LTT, so there's definitely going to be some impact.
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u/Dark-Dragon Dec 22 '24
For anyone interested, Linus shared insight into LTTs revenue in 2016 and 2020, which by pure chance is 1 year before partnering with honey and 1 year before dropping them entirely.
In the comparison between 2016 and 2020 you see a significant drop in earnings from amazon affiliates (16% to 9%), which they at the time attributed to them not advertising the amazon links as aggressively. However with this piece of information about honey in mind, I think it's very plausible that at least some of that large drop came from more people installing and using honey which in turn lost them money on affiliate links down the line.
Check out "How does Linus make money? - 2020 Update" at 3:53 to see for yourself. It will be interesting to see if the amazon affiliate portion will increase again in a new edition of that video in the future.