In this post, we'll try to shed some light on Honeygain, an innovative application that allows users to generate passive income by sharing their Internet connection. If you're an avid reader of IT-related articles or an IT innovation enthusiast, you'll most likely already heard about it, as there has been a lot of talk about this application in recent months.
Is this really a brilliant idea? Are we facing a concrete way to earn something or is it some sort of scam? And, most importantly, how does it work, and how much can we earn while using it? In this post, we'll try to answer all these questions.
What it is
First of all, let's quickly summarize what Honeygain actually is. In a nutshell, Honeygain makes your internet bandwidth available to its trustworthy business partners, who can then use it to fulfill a range of business (research, distributed tasks, e-commerce, web intelligence, and so on). In other words, it's a way to "resell" part of your internet connection to third parties, in exchange for credits. Those credits, once earned, can be exchanged for cash once a certain threshold (currently $20) is achieved.
To better explain the concept, check out this quick introductory video taken from the Honeygain official YouTube channel:
This peculiar way of work puts Honeygain into the category of passive income apps, just like Nielsen, Swagbucks, and the like: those apps, which have already existed for many years, offer the chance to earn money/credits while watching advertising banners. However, the real difference here is that you don't get paid to watch ads, but by giving away a portion of your bandwidth that you are not (likely) using to its full extent. This, in my opinion, is the real added value of Honeygain when compared to its predecessors: you are not selling your time, your eyes, or part of your desktop space that you could use instead, but something that you often don't need - simply because your internet connection offers way more bandwidth that you're going to use 90% of the time, even when you are actively surfing the web.
How does it work
Now that we have understood what Honeygain is about, let's try to figure out how it works. Once installed, the app opens a sort of proxy service that allows your device (desktop or mobile) to become part of a wider network (the Honeygain network). This network is then made accessible by third parties, such as data scientists, e-commerce platforms, web intelligence companies, and other trustworthy companies, which use it to extract insights from the web for their purposes (market research, fraud prevention, brand protection, pricing intelligence, travel fare aggregation, SEO monitoring, and so on) in exchange of a fee. Part of that fee is then distributed back to the network peer (those who installed the app) in form of credits, which can be converted into money. That's it: no more, no less.
Security considerations
Since we are talking about an app that makes part of your internet bandwidth available, someone might turn up their noses: is this really a safe solution? Are there no security risks? What guarantees do I have that those "third parties" do not have access to my data?
As a matter of fact, Honeygain doesn't gather any data from its users and doesn't make them accessible to third parties. The segregation between your bandwidth (and system) and the portion of unused bandwidth that gets used by the partners is complete: moreover, all the Honeygain network data is fully encrypted, thus guaranteeing that even the "peer" user is unable to see what's his/her bandwidth is being used for.
Another doubt that could arise concerns the use of the service by the partners. What guarantees do we have that someone does not use our bandwidth to carry out illegal activities?
That's the main reason why Honeygain enforces the concept of trustworthy partners: they require their customers to operate their business in accordance with applicable laws, and ask them to fill out extensive know-your-customer forms explaining the specific use case for which internet traffic will be used for. If this legal obligation is broken, Honeygain retains the contractual right to request them to step in and take the responsibility for any kind of activities that would fall under authority investigation, thus preventing any responsibility from their unaware users. In other words, this means that we can safely use it without the risk of getting involved in illicit activities.
How much can you earn?
There's still an important question to ask: is it really worth it? How much can I earn using this service? The answer can be taken from the Honeygain official website, where we can find the current payout rate.
- For Default network sharing, you will earn 3 credits for 10MB of traffic that goes through you: in other words, 3 USD for 10GB.
- For Content Delivery (if available in your region), you will earn 6 credits for every hour Content Delivery is active and running (not queued).
According to the Honeygain website, the average user will be able to gain 26.58 USD in a month. That's definitely not bad, since you are getting paid to do (almost) nothing: however, the earnings may vary, depending on several things: the demand for internet bandwidth, the overall available bandwidth, and so on. Luckily, there are also plenty of ways to increase and stabilize earnings, as explained in this tutorial video from the Honeygain official YouTube channel:
If you prefer to read those suggestions, check out this page instead.
Conclusions
Honeygain offers a true passive income opportunity with little or no effort: all you need to do is sign up and use the app - no other activity is required to earn credits. This fact alone, in our opinion, is interesting enough to try it.
The only "con" we can think of is the fact that you won't have control over the third parties that will use your connection - including what sites/data are accessed: however, all the connections and transferred data will be encrypted, segregated and unaccessible from the outside, meaning that nothing will directly affect you or your online reputation: it is, therefore, more of an ethical question than anything else - assuming you don't trust the checks performed by Honeygain on partners, which are rather strict and should prevent the possibility that the service is used to fulfill illicit activities.
