Some people’s bullshit detectors are better than others. Based on spending a lot of time around obvious bullshit I see a lot of people with nearly nonexistent radar detectors. Even more annoying, the crowd that understands some of the most obvious grift but doesn’t ever get to the advanced level of getting inside other people’s heads - some people can and do fall for even the most asinine scams. If nobody fell for it, the scam wouldn’t exist.
Trying to explain this to someone, trying to encourage them to warn and prepare others is met with:
You refusing to believe that Flat Earth, chemtrails or gematria content is possibly ripping people off doesn’t stop it. “Nobody is stupid enough to fall for that!” shows personal ignorance and is not a powerful condemnation of the people that have been the target of grift.
In a nutshell, the Honey scam worked like this -
Bigger YouTube channels also make money by promoting advertisements outside the YouTube ads. A product or service often related to the channel (e.g. replica miniature weapons for a battlefield history channel) will take a time out to promote the ad. Having a large following of biased (not necessarily in a bad way) provides a ready made audience for the adjacent product.
It doesn’t have to be specific to the channel, and Honey coupons were that type. (VPN ads are another common generic ad association). Honey would spend money going directly to influencers to talk about the coupons. On the surface the deal operated like this:
You load Honey on to your device, and when you go shopping Honey automatically kicks in and finds the best coupon available resulting in maximizing the discount you get at checkout. No more fuss searching for yourself, after loading Honey it’s in the background.
This is a variation of the too good to be true money making ideas. Honey itself can’t scale up their own purchases to take advantage of their own product to make it worthwhile. It needs a mass audience. And that’s the red flag that finally brought it down. The math didn’t make sense - spending millions of dollars to advertise to get back a portion of revenue invested. Some people started digging and then the reveal of the scammy nature went viral. The app was faking the amount of some discounts. And sometimes inserting itself as the user that clicked last and stealing the whole discount. But, watch the video for the full detail.
A gematria sports betting channel is more of a self contained operation. No channel has been big enough to get the attention of the marketing deals the bigger influencers are involved in. But there is constant trolling from other low level grift. For years now the ads YouTube puts with the videos that qualify for monetization are sometimes pretty obviously BS. Those advertisers don’t have the millions to invest in marketing like Honey had. Just because you don’t believe people are dumb enough to fall for it doesn’t mean others aren’t. Honey was able to get away with it for quite awhile including pulling the wool over the eyes of some smarter than average content creators.
No comments:
Post a Comment