The Honey Scam: Explained

all right 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 uh it involves almost every high-profile creator that I can think of including myself and it kind of came out of nowhere uh surfaced by a Creator called Mega lag 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/ 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 you

go to check out on Amazon or Best Buy or 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 Pro 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 Hy 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 mega lag video he goes over it apparently there were hundreds of creators across billions 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 uh 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 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 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 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 want 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 move 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 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 makes 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 this specific double speak I think is worthy of using the word scam because we we use that word kind of loosely these days but this sort of double speak 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 three% 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 is 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 to anyone that uses affiliate codes by poaching

their affiliate Vue 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 Mega lag 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 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 um I think obviously number one is uninstall honey if you have it installed uh 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 uh 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 are all back in the brief period where I was working with standard and i' 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 uh 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 anymore than I possibly could now of course I know not everyone can do this like there there are creators with various amounts of involvement with honey I I think LT was one of the examples from the mega lag 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 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 going to be sponsors like I think

we can appreciate that it's 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 I seemed fine to me it's a no Brer 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 sa stuff that they were doing or we never would have worked with them like there

was a few Mur rings in some threads from a few years ago uh 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 like this was 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 uh 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 um but yeah just a little extra food for thought and if you don't know now you know thanks for watching catch you guys in the next one peace [Music]