Alright, so if you've been online in the past week, you've probably had some headline cross your path or in some way been recommended to watch the video about the greatest scam in the history of the creator economy or whatever else is being called. And it's actually, it's actually kind of an incredible story. It's around one of the biggest YouTube sponsors ever.
It involves almost every high profile creator that I can think of, including myself. And it kind of came out of nowhere, surfaced by a creator called Megalag. And yeah, that is me in the thumbnail. So you're probably wondering how we got here.
So let's just break this down. It's all around this company slash product called Honey. And if you somehow haven't heard of Honey up until this point, here's what it claims to be. And I'm specifically using that phrasing.
It's what it claims to be. Honey is a free browser extension that claims to find you the best coupon codes at checkout. when you're buying things online. That's the pitch. So, you know, you're checking out some online purchase and there's that box to input coupon codes.
So you go to checkout on Amazon or Best Buy, whatever it is. And if you have Honey installed, you hit apply Honey at checkout and it goes through its huge database of all the coupon codes it knows about and applies the best ones there to save you the most money on your purchase. Seems great.
It's one of the most popular browser extensions of all time. It has 17... million users in the Chrome extension store as of right now.
It's insanely popular. And they for years have also had a massive budget to pay creators as well to run ads on YouTube. So they have also become one of the biggest, one of the most proliferate, proliferate, proliferating, prominent.
They've been one of the biggest YouTube sponsors of all time. And you know, one thing about being a YouTube creator, and I can attest to this, is sponsors in general are very important to the business, but can also be very difficult to work with all the time. And so if there is a sponsor that comes around and starts doing ads that is very easy to work with and just gets it, like just lets the YouTuber do their thing, very lenient, word about that gets around.
And so I'm about to talk about all the horrible things Honey did in a second, but if you want to give them credit for anything, it's that they were very YouTube forward. They were one of the most YouTube forward marketing companies ever. In the Megalag video, he goes over it.
Apparently, there were hundreds of creators across billions of views across all the videos they advertised in, including three of my own. More on that later. But unfortunately, there are two major, extremely shady things that Honey has been doing this entire time. One of them kind of behind the scenes and the other just in plain sight. So the first thing had to do with affiliate codes.
So now again, if you. spent a lot of time online, you've probably heard about these a lot. But if you haven't, the way this generally works is if I'm a creator, and I make a video about a product, and I have an affiliate link to that product, and you click it, and then go through the checkout and buy the product, I will get a small kickback for referring you to that sale, almost like a car salesman will get a referral or a real estate agent gets a referral. Same idea.
And you can even sometimes see the little affiliate code up in a URL bar when you're clicking on them and checking out. It's very common. This is how they're supposed to work.
Now, there's lots of other complicated dynamics and variables even within that system. But the bottom line here is lots of online retailers have affiliate programs and encourage people to use them. But Honey, the thing about Honey is they were always the last step before checkout for basically every online purchase that the people who've installed it are making.
So if you went to click on that link... in a video and even click a creator's referral code, no matter what, if you click apply honey at checkout, they would remove the creator's affiliate code and replace it with their own every single time. So they collect the affiliate revenue for the sale on every site, every time, no matter who actually referred you to go buy that thing. Already incredibly slimy behavior, very behind the scenes shady stuff. And that by itself would be enough, I think, for basically any creator to hear about that and stop working with Honey.
Like that, just that one thing would be enough. But like I said, there's two things. So then number two. Okay, so think about this.
If you are an online retailer, you actually don't really like Honey, right? Like this is a web browser extension that a bunch of people have. that every time they buy something from your site it like goes through and makes sure that they apply coupon codes which takes away from your bottom line and make sure you make less money so It's not their favorite thing in the world, just by default. So Honey, with all this leverage, they would go around trying to convince stores and online retailers to partner with them.
And one of the key benefits of partnering with Honey was that you get to choose which coupon codes show up in Honey's database for all of its users. So that means if there's a 20% coupon code and a 3% coupon code, you're... definitely going to make sure only the 3% coupon code shows up for Honey users by default. So this specific doublespeak I think is worthy of using the word scam because we use that word kind of loosely these days, but this sort of doublespeak of out of one side of your mouth, you're telling customers you should use Honey because it can make sure you get the best deals and coupon codes whenever you check out. And on the other side of your mouth, you're telling retailers, you should partner with Honey because you can prevent customers from getting the best deals and coupon codes when they use Honey.
They can't both be true. It's basically Honey going up to these stores and being like, hey, just give us 3%, give us 5% commission on your sales, and we'll make this coupon code problem go away. That double messaging is the core of why Honey is being called a scam. It's because you have to be lying to one of those sides to make any of this work. And I'll give you a hint, they're lying to users.
So they are stealing from creators and journalistic outlets, anyone that uses affiliate codes, by poaching their affiliate revenue. And they are clearly not giving the best coupon codes and discounts to users because of the way they operate. I think, obviously, if I had known any of this, I never would have worked with Honey. And neither would the creators who did. But clearly nobody knew about this going on because...
According to that Megalag video, again, like I said, they've sponsored 5,000 plus different videos, which ended up totaling nearly 8 billion views. It's crazy in hindsight how much they've pulled this off, just being super easy to work with and then doing all this behind our backs. I think Austin Evans said it best in his video. They're paying creators up front for the ad and then stealing from their back pockets. So what do we do about it?
What is the actual answer here? I think obviously number one is. uninstall Honey if you have it installed. If you didn't ever install Honey, good for you. Keep it that way.
And then you can actively go around and tell people, like warn people not to install Honey because it actively takes away from the blogs and creators that you could be supporting. And then for me personally, so I had three videos sponsored by Honey. These were all four plus years ago.
They were all in 2020 around the same time. My Poco M3 review. my Moto Edge Plus review, and my Galaxy S20 Fan Edition review.
So three smartphone reviews. These were all back in the brief period where I was working with Standard, and I'd actually almost signed up to do two more in 2021, but then I stopped working with Standard. Long story.
But what I've done is I've gone back and with YouTube's editor, you might know this, you can trim out sections of videos, I have removed the Honey ads from those videos in the name of not accidentally promoting Honey any more than I possibly could. Now, of course, I know not everyone can do this. Like there are creators with various amounts of involvement with Honey. I think LTT was one of the examples from the Megalag video. They had like dozens, dozens of videos sponsored by Honey.
So it would be, I mean, it would take longer. I guess they could do it. But cutting all those ads out is challenging depending on how the ad was put in the video.
And they also unfortunately paid for a custom video that they could use on their own YouTube channel to run as an ad. So I can't remove that one, unfortunately. So that sucks. But the lesson learned here definitely is for myself and basically every other creator who got got with working with Honey is to be even more skeptical about the products and companies that we actually put in front of our audience, especially if they're gonna be sponsors.
Like, I think we can appreciate that it's not super hard to vet these things. We can dig in and use the products, for example, that we're going to share. And even with Honey, like I installed it, I- Did a few things, bought a few things, it worked, so it seemed fine to me.
It's a no-brainer, other creators love working with them. But clearly, nobody had seen the things that they were doing. Very few people, anyway, had been aware of all the shady stuff that they were doing, or we never would have worked with them. Like, there was a few murmurings in some threads from a few years ago, and there was a hilarious clip of Markiplier from like four years ago, being very suspicious of them, but still nothing ever really came of it. Until this mega lag video surfaced everything so shout out to him for actually going in and showing the affiliate code poaching and For doing the research for all of this.
He says he has more videos coming up on this, too I think the crazy thing to me is just that it was all happening in plain sight like this Honey was owned by PayPal and this wasn't like some shady thing they were doing on the side to win some extra revenue that PayPal didn't know about. No, this is their revenue. This is the thing that they do to make money. This is their business model.
So uninstall Honey. Stop using Honey if you already have it. Don't install it if you weren't going to. And yeah, time to get super selective about sponsors on YouTube, especially in 2025. For me, that basically just looks like being. Extra committed to the long-term channel partners that I have like dbrand and the collaborations with Ridge and things like that Those I know are great But yeah, just a little extra food for thought and if you don't know now, you know Thanks for watching Catch you guys the next one peace