Editing Honey browser plugin controversy (section)

==Victim group 3: online marketing affiliates  and content creators==

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Affiliate marketing is a revenue-sharing model in which individuals or entities (affiliates) partner with companies to earn money for advertising goods and services. This is done through the use of personalized links to track which affiliate sent which customers to an online store. If a customer makes a purchase using an affiliate link, the affiliate whose link was used gets a commission on the sale.

Honey disrupts this practice by replacing an existing affiliate link with their own on the checkout page, whenever a customer interacts with the extension in search of coupons. It does this even when it is unable to find a coupon for the customer. When the customer makes their purchase, Honey takes credit for the sale and gets the commission.

The Honey extension was largely advertised by content creators on [[YouTube]] as well as other social-media platforms. Affiliate marketing can make up a significant portion of a content creator's revenue. Most of the influencers who promoted Honey were unaware of its practices and thus unknowingly promoted a browser extension that poaches their affiliate revenue. Estimates of "stolen" revenue are upwards of 5 million USD. The discovery of Honey's practices has led to a [[class action lawsuit|class-action lawsuit]] launched by Wendover Productions.

*''It is this practice in particular that has attracted legal attention, as several of Honey’s victims in this instance are or were attorneys who create content about legal controversies (such as LegalEagle and America’s Attorney). They have documented their view on the lawsuit here: https://honeylawsuit.com/''<!-- this is a very partisan source - we shouldn't be saying 'find out more' and then linking to one half of a lawsuit. Instead, try and find some media source which has a reasonable detail of reporting on the lawsuit.

In general though, we shouldn't even be saying to the reader 'hey, do this!' in any capacity -->