@ They got caught selling their clients info to companies based on the mental illness they had or what they were going through. Basically taking private info you’re trusting a therapist who’s supposed to help you with was being sold to big corporations…
I had the addon installed for a long time and honestly, I feel like it only found working coupons on a handful of occasions. Most of the time it was just in the way with its popups and I eventually removed it.
I was finding this too. I only kept it in the end to see the price history of a product but if they're editing affiliate links/cookies I'm not willing to use even that.
@@LukeTR2000 not only that, but it gives businesses the option to limit the % discount on coupons found. So, for example, if a store has a 35% coupon code out there in the internet, and the business selects the option provided by Honey, then instead of showing that 35% coupon to the customer, Honey will say "we found a 10% off coupon". This makes the customer think that 10% is the best, when in fact there was a 35% coupon available all along. This is literally the opposite of Honey's "best deal" claim. imo this is Fraud by Paypal (owners of honey)
I have a theory why that might be. I think what honey does in pretty much like a low sweep search like google. In google if you usually search up X coupons, it brings you up to those coupon sites with expired codes. I think honey does something similar so 90% of the time it finds old coupons and maybe if lucky it'll bring up that 10% of recent coupons. Most businesses usually lock coupons now behind email/subscriptions anyway. So pretty much honey forces the consumer to buy its membership to get the deals. I can't prove it, but it kind of makes a little sense.
Maybe, but just searching for codes sounds too good to be true as well, but that works just fine. Doesn't seem insane for a company to gather your data just to provide codes, but they did it horribly.
@@antolepage26after initially finding out about it and not telling anyone, AND THEN worked with another sponsor that literally works the same way LMAO
The really sad part is that all these influences helped Honey amass over 17 million users, which are now _ALL_ affecting every single person who has affiliate links because every time one of those 17 million users clicks on _anyones_ affiliate link to buy something, Honey is stealing the sale.
@@bluegizmo1983 Honey is stealing the sale and also deciding whether you get the highest discount code or one that benefits them more than giving you the best deal.
Not only that but they aren't giving you the highest value for the coupon because that is the deal with the partner companies and sometimes they put a 60%reduction for the product even if the seller NEVER proposed in their history such product price cut Ahh but that's NOT all. The same team that sold Honey for 20 billions to Paypal is proposing now the newest scam "PIE" extension that will show you only what commercials you want and they will give you some money for that. More details on Upper Echelon channel, the video is called "Exposing the"PIE" Influencer Disaster.
My biggest gripe now is that there's not much evidence of theft. They've been caught with the method. But in court, prosecutors also need to prove how much has been rerouted. Honey's cookie method hides a lot of this evidence, so it's up to the prosecutors to ask Honey to disclose their financials, which is likely going to be obfuscated with losses Hollywood-accounting style.
nothing will happen to honey, this is fake manufactured outrage by these influencers cause theyre butthurt about their precious little affiliate links. No one actually cares. The real consumers will continue to use it
this, it was good before, after paypal bought it i barely got any fkn coupons. That being said honey DID save me thousands of dollars, but now i feel cheated as they basicly screwed everyone to get those discounts
Even funnier is that PayPal belongs is one of Musk's companies. What better way to get even richer than stealing other peoples money without them even noticing.
Definitely stopped working as well when PayPal bought them, I remember it use to be better and I would get more cash back points but now I only get a discount code every once in a while 😢
1:37 No. It quite literally does not do what it advertises. The sponsors all say you will get the BEST deal. And you will not. There's better deals online but the shops partner with Honey to give you a lower promo code based on what they set it to, in exchange for a 3% store commission
Honey basically strong hold shops and brands into partnering with them or they will dig up your 90% off coupon, imo that’s just a type of gangsters protection racket, pay up or we will ruin your business
Even the Megalag video says sometimes it does work fully as intended, which is weird. He showed a coupon code of him getting a $35 item for free. So, hey, sometimes it does work.
It’s not just honey. It’s PayPal. So if no influencers work with PayPal anymore then it might hurt them more. They don’t call them the PayPal mafia for no reason
There's NO WAY! Honey found a cupon for me when Ive bought my land in Scotland to become a Lord, and for my personal therapist on Better Help...also on Keeps to keep my hair when im angry cause i lose in World of Tanks. But i always use my Raycon earbuds which ive bought with a honey discount. 😢
"it works, it does what it advertises" - no it literally doesnt, that was the whole point of megalag's video, it purposefully omitted better coupons that existed and that you could find yourself if you tried while claiming it did the searching for you to find the best coupon....."I hope this is a lesson for you" - really? I hope this is a lesson for youtubers to vet their sponsors better for the sake of their viewers.....
Was about to call BS on this myself. I had this shit app for about a year. It never saved me any money, never had any codes that worked. I got rid of it years ago.
But if you did "vet" them you would have found nothing... Like you said that was the whole point of MegaLag's video... NO ONE KNEW (well a couple people worked it out) but it took a multi year investigation to truly uncover all of this... Almost any content creator would have thought they were legit because there wasnt a whole "hey this is dodgy" discussion around this, I dont think anyone really knew the extent of the scam
It does sometimes, even Megalag said that towards the end. But it looked like he's going to do a follow up video regarding that. Personally it worked for me when I first had it (it even got me 20% off a $400 item), but for awhile now I did notice I had been able to find better codes on my own just searching for a few minutes. I thought Honey just got lazy, now I know it was more nefarious than that.
Influencers who get their bag will just do damage control and not really try and make themselves look bad by offering any real apology. Because the next scam that comes along they will take that bag too without doing any research beforehand. “It works” is hilarious because apparently Austin hasn’t actually paid attention to what the criticism is lol
there was one time i order papa johns online for a group and it was like $55, honey somehow brought it down to like $20, i was kinda blown away. Then it never worked again lol
I tried it. It added to many steps for check out lol. So I gave up and deleted it. I much rather use creator code at checkout then whole web browser extension.
@@sopcannon i used it and it worked for me like 3 times, tbf i was buying pricey stuff so maybe thats why, wouldnt be surprised that for cheap items it doenst do anything
We have been trying to highlight the problem with honey for years but as a small channel not many people listened or shared the information, glad the truth is finally coming out to the mainstream
@@rory-red when it got really popular just before the covid era we noticed that our own affiliate stats suddenly went down the toilet and it coincided with the massive push from honey advertising and larger channels recommending it. We noticed that the honey extension was killing off affiliate links to other channels we were trying to support and highlighted this in our live streams as a heads up to viewers that like to support creators that honey was stealing links.
The comments are insane, "surprised this hasn't been talked about sooner" "I would never use this blah blah blah" "if it's too good to be true" took a dude several years to discover and investigate this, all of a sudden everyone acting like they're above it and knew the entire time. This isn't about you.
"We're suing honey because it didn't do things the way we assumed it did". They've done nothing illegal, the whole premise was that it searched the web for promocodes which weren't given to you and therefore not yours but now people have a problem with it might hurt content creators
@@chadhowell1328they're not stealing affiliates, it's the user who click on honey to find promo codes who give permissions. If anything it's the users who are giving the revenue to honey instead of creators.
Honey is here to stay. I do not care that rich people are losing money. This really does not seem like an issue that the common man should care about. It should be resolved in court between other rich people
Except according to TH-cam, you cannot do anything about it. Yeah, the feds would like a word with TH-cam and Google on their anti-ad blocker crusade, because this is going too far.
I just wanted to thank you for making this video. Many people don't realize how much a video like this can hurt the channel in the long run, so ... props and huge respect for doing this!
Same here, I think of the hundreds of purchases I've made, it only actually worked once. Not due to my niche hobbies and purchases, I've also used it plenty of times on mainstream websites like Walmart and Amazon. It just never helped other than like one time on g2a of all places lmao.
Austin my man, it literally doesn't work the way it advertises... it rigged both ends of the coupon system... we the end users aren't saving any more than we would've had they not existed.. it also poisons the well for other creators.
I don’t appreciate that he said that, but he does show later in the video that he understands the problem and why it’s not in fact as advertised. I guess he meant it does find promo codes, just not the “best” promo code?
@@norgafThat’s kind of the point though. The way he frames it for people who don’t watch all the way to the end - most YT viewers - the message is “this affected creators but it’s still great for you the consumer.” It’s like when fine print directly contradicts the claim.
Even the Megalag video says sometimes it does work fully as intended, which is weird. He showed a coupon code of him getting a $35 item for free. So, hey, sometimes it does work.
7:32 the way I understood the source video wasn’t so much that Honey was shaking down stores/businesses but more like they we’re facilitating the deals that were less beneficial to the consumer. In other words it felt more like the stores themselves wanted only the “eh” coupons to be shown so that they would reap more profits. Honey is still scummy in this scenario but it also shows that businesses themselves aren’t always looking out for the consumer either (obvious fact but wanted to clarify it anyways).
@@rahbabchowdhury4504 as far as i am understanding that are special codes like 10 year customer and should not leaked to the public. Honey now only shows this codes if you are not a partner otherwise honey controls the coupons.
For example HelloFresh which seemed nice, is being sued for using child labor. Sponsorblock definitely seems like a necessary extension now to avoid these horrible companies.
This is why i watch you austin your humbleness, willingness to admit wrong, and coverage and explanation of everything is A Plus material. Youre honest and youre human we all make mistakes even if we dont know we're making them
This is why I have sponsor block to skip those sponsered segments. As much as I want to trust my favorite content creator with whatever they advertise to me, there have been multiple instances where what they advertised are either shady or straight up scams.
This is why I use an ad blocker. Whenever aTuber promotes anything, I immediately skip or ignore the ad. I pay for TH-cam Premium to avoid seeing ads altogether because almost every advertisement is entirely irrelevant to me.
The more a company tries to push a product, the more likely it's garbage or nefarious. Plus you know if they're spending a lot on marketing, there's less spent on the actual product.
In what way is he looking out for smaller creators? He still said the extension worked and "did what it advertises" which it clearly didn't. In the video he sounded like he knew about the fishy affiliate link thing when he the sponsorship 3 YEARS ago. Yet he isn't being called out for not letting ppl know like another ytuber I know so good looking out there.
@@turbot_ I get that you care only about the end price and dont care about money the affiliates make as long as you get to save, but please understand that you are NOT actually saving money because they are intentionally HIDING better coupons from you that you could easily find in 1 google search, that's the biggest problem with honey
Honey also mostly uses web scraping methods to collect these coupons which is not illegal but it is unethical as it can increase server load, and as a result causing performance issues for the websites.
You couldn't get around PayPal for most online shops if you from the EU since most people didn't have a credit card, but now most banks include a credit card function with you normal bank card
These fiascos prove that these influencers and content creators should call for more ad regulation. The influencers, except the biggest ones, lack the resources to vet these advertisers adequately. They need help. Otherwise these embarassing situations will keep popping up, making youtubers and tiktokers look like jackasses in perpetuity. Just recently in the PC hardware space, we had NZXT, and now greater TH-cam has Honey. And we get these awkward apology-lite videos from the content creators
NZXT is not the same case, these youtubers could have gotten all that information by actually looking throught the website and weighing what the value proposition is, instead they just decided to take the money and parrot the talking points without a single critical thought, its not the same thing. Government is always slow on regulations, and do you think that a lot of these influencer would just wait around when money are on the table, a lot of them already promote obvious placebos and straight up scams?
To be fair I think more people on the back end who are managing these sponsorships for influencers should educate themselves on other marketing methods. If they had understood affiliate marketing more they’d have likely known that this is what Honey, Retail Me Not, Rakuten, etc have been doing for decades.
@@LinoBarraza Never said he was the first one who found out... I was talking about him addressing this from MegaLag and now all the others are doing it because it gets them views.
All this is good, but the actual question is, as youtubers, are you and the others going to sue them or not because you obviously already got paid for the sponsorship?
Or maybe they didn't realize? I mean they were the ones losing affiliate revenue and end consumer(well at first) didn't really lose anything. And the part where they force businesses, how do you know when this started happening, I'd say before PayPal buyout they were too small to force anything on anyone.
Back when I used to place orders for customers when I worked in a call center, I would always use Honey to scan for coupon codes to apply to peoples orders, but I never knew how awful those scammers were 😮.
I'd be interested to know if the Microsoft Edge native coupon thing also does this, it sometimes recommends available coupons or even just telling you "there's a cheaper seller on Amazon". Granted it's not as intrusive as Honey but I'm guessing it has a similar concept.
Of course it does. Do you think it's going to give you discounts for free? Microsoft wants money, they want users, they cloned the concept. Users save and are relatively happy - so they're more likely to continue using edge, and Microsoft makes some of that money along with the data garnered by their users shopping habits.
@irishlad1367 it scams both, you think you're getting a deal but a lot of the time there's a significantly better deal that they're not telling you about
I'm so very glad a big channel and company like y'all are taking about this. It's so important that content creators speak out about this situation and stop these shady companies from abusing us.
I respect you for making this video. A lot of creators that probably should, will stay quiet about it. That shows a lack of respect toward their audience. Thanks for being a good person.
not honey, PAYPAL. i suggest a banking license for paypal and i bet you, the next day paypal will be history. if people are coming to look into paypals books, it WILL be a mess.
Good for you. I always shrug when I see Honey sponsorships. Almost anything that claims to help you while being free or cheap is conning somebody in one way or another.
You’ve vastly missed the point to take away here. You as an influencer owe it to your viewers to fully vet every opportunity that you take. You, and hundreds of other large TH-camrs failed at that and just took the money and ran. It just so happens in this case, you got got just as much as your viewers got got this time around. Do better. All of TH-cam, do better.
I saw a youtuber do a Raid Shadow Legends ad and shit on the game later in the same video lol. Most influencers don’t care what it is they advertise as long as they get paid, sadly.
@ Exactly, and that’s the problem. They’re already selling out their audience. They might as well take that rug pull crypto or CA skin casino money. I bet they think they’re better than that though. The only reason this Honey one has blown up is because these creators screwed themselves in this. How many explanation/apology videos like this have you seen for BetterHelp?
What?! TH-camrs were unknowingly pushing a scam? How could it be? The sponsorships felt like a scam and I typically avoided channels promoting it because it made the channel seem super shady. Perhaps TH-camrs didn’t know they were being scammed but I find it absolutely ridiculous TH-camrs didn’t know they were pushing a scam on their viewers.
I watched the doc yesterday . I never installed honey, but I had a capital one and Rakuten installed. Never actually got a good deal on either, but after seeing what honey did, I could only assume they do the same, and both are now uninstalled.
I use Rakuten and get amazing deals so to each their own i suppose. Most recent one was 90% off on my yearly vpn subscription and I believe it was 15% off my hotel stay with IHG. I have them transferred out as AMEX points. Consumers haven't been hurt in any way but do what you think u gotta do.
he's teasing a video where for some reason honey is offering / showing promo codes that aren't supposed to be broadcasted, or are expired or whatever, where you can get as much as 100% off the purchase price. That's so fucked up. I wonder if honey is doing it intentionally. I think the second video is going to blow up the internet
Does Honey also claims a referral code even if you don't come from a previous promoter? Lets say a customer wants to buy something and no-one referred the product. Does Honey claims they referred/promoted the product anyways, and if they do so, would it be considered stealing from the companies themselves?
how would they be stealing from the business when it's the business itself that gave them the referral? referral isn't automatic, it's businesses that give it to honey
I'm waiting for LMG to respond to this situation. I actually got Honey because of them and used it on their affiliate links to Amazon. I did that intentionally to support LMG years ago. I wonder how long this has been happening and I really hope there is a class action lawsuit against them.
@ Content creators need to take responsibility for what they advertise. We follow them because we trust their recommendations, not to investigate every product they promote. If we had to research everything ourselves, we wouldn’t have time to enjoy their content.
@@dessol4362 Endorsing is different than advertising, When a TH-camr says "I use honey, or I recommend honey", it's an endorsement and they share part of the responsibility
This is the worst. Scripted video ever ever TH-camrs Who's talking about it saying yeah, I used it in the past.That's why I did the sponsorship with them
@gloriousapplebees they're essentially dropshipped headphones that are inflated in price yet marketed as being affordable by "cutting out the middle man". They arent bad, but you can purchase similar, or better, products for far cheaper if you purchase directly from moondrop or other chinese companies. Not a scam, and quite clever marketing, but kinda scummy
At this point, I just blanket assume anything that is a massive sponsor on hundreds of channels is a scam or bad in some other way. It just keeps happening.
Good lesson to learn for the future Austin. It's not enough to know "if" the company or product/service works, you should also look more into "how" it works so you don't get end up repeating past mistakes.
If you watched the MegaLag video, then you'd know they've already talked about this years ago. Granted it was just in a form post, but they weren't silent about it.
@@_DewGamingthe problem is that, while its good they discovered the scam and broke away from honey, they did not warn anybody. LTT has a huge reach and should feel compelled to warn about shady companies as they find out they are scamming…they did not do this. An answer on a low view forum post is not a warning, and then they also partnered with a similar company pulling the same crap after the fact. They need to answer to this, as they could have saved creators and consumers from the scam that honey is.
@_DewGaming I think you're missing the point he has been oddly silent since this video came out. My bet is they are hoping that if they ignore it that it will just fade away. A forum post addressing it was pretty weak he has a huge ass platform why didn't they cover it in a video when they found out? Nope they instead chose to put out a weak forum post that probably 80% or more of his viewers never saw.
Honey is also taking your data, my data everyone else's data and selling it to anyone who wants to pay for it That's a lot more money than some affiliate codes.
I was just thinking the same thing. Several youtubers have covered the video that released a couple days ago yet nothing from Linus but crickets chirping
@@Ok-kf8xg The post was "hidden" in the LTT forums. A 5 minutes video in any of their channels would have made enough noise to let people know. Also a lot of people installed that thing because of them, seems fair.
PIE the ad blocker as well "which is the same company" and they don't hide it. PIE hurts creators since it replaces Google & TH-cam Ads with PIE's own ads so they reap the reward while the creator gets ZERO and you still have to watch and AD.
your a tech guy who has been way more familiar with this stuff than most if not all of us. that's all you were aware of? come on....... edit: after watching the rest of the video... really? no apology? take your money and make a short video to take the blame off you and run with the cash ok
I'm glad many of you guys have enough integrity to acknowledge it and tell your audiences. I mean, it hardly effects them but still, it's nice. I do think influencers have GOT to be more careful with who they take sponsorships from. It's getting old. What will eventually happen is people will value your word for a sponsorship less and less, and then its bye bye money once the brands realize that. Your face, your word, your image is your living.
This is totally unacceptable. I will discuss this with my BetterHelp therapist as soon as i get back from visiting my plot of land in Scotland!
Wild crossover appears!
😂😂😂
😂
Hopefully you checked honey first for coupon codes before you bought your plot of land!
Will you be discussing it with your therapist while using opera gx and nord vpn?
Honey and Better Help need to be GONE!!!
Paypal and general needs to go, they've been scummy for years now, straight up robbing people from their hard earned money
What is better help doing?
@
They got caught selling their clients info to companies based on the mental illness they had or what they were going through. Basically taking private info you’re trusting a therapist who’s supposed to help you with was being sold to big corporations…
Ya what’s they doing?
@@PeterZinpeople have really bad experiences with their therapists pretty commonly and they seem to be doing nothing about it
I had the addon installed for a long time and honestly, I feel like it only found working coupons on a handful of occasions. Most of the time it was just in the way with its popups and I eventually removed it.
I was finding this too. I only kept it in the end to see the price history of a product but if they're editing affiliate links/cookies I'm not willing to use even that.
And it seriously went downhill after PayPal acquired them.
@@LukeTR2000 not only that, but it gives businesses the option to limit the % discount on coupons found. So, for example, if a store has a 35% coupon code out there in the internet, and the business selects the option provided by Honey, then instead of showing that 35% coupon to the customer, Honey will say "we found a 10% off coupon". This makes the customer think that 10% is the best, when in fact there was a 35% coupon available all along. This is literally the opposite of Honey's "best deal" claim. imo this is Fraud by Paypal (owners of honey)
I never got a discount XD. Whenever I needed to free up RAM, Honey was the 1st one to be removed and then stopped installing it since like 2018
I dont trust free javascript extensions that earn millions, the business model is highly suspect
It works for honey coupons... But it doesn't find the best coupons available. So it doesn't work, not as advertised.
Fr, it's as if he missed that part of Megalag's video.
I have a theory why that might be. I think what honey does in pretty much like a low sweep search like google. In google if you usually search up X coupons, it brings you up to those coupon sites with expired codes. I think honey does something similar so 90% of the time it finds old coupons and maybe if lucky it'll bring up that 10% of recent coupons. Most businesses usually lock coupons now behind email/subscriptions anyway. So pretty much honey forces the consumer to buy its membership to get the deals. I can't prove it, but it kind of makes a little sense.
@Che1seabluesdrogba11 did either of you watch past the first 2 minutes?
@@Che1seabluesdrogba11 More like it's as if both of you missed the parts of the video where he talks about that 6:21 6:52 7:05 7:55
One would think Honey coupons worked for Honey...
If it sounds too good to be true, it’s too good to be true.
bbl is worth it tho
always was and always will be
Honey definitely not sweet
Maybe, but just searching for codes sounds too good to be true as well, but that works just fine. Doesn't seem insane for a company to gather your data just to provide codes, but they did it horribly.
@@elijahcity6239 lol nope
I respect actually talking about this instead of just pretending it didn't happen and not answering questions.
Oh you mean like Linus lol. Who found out they were doing this years ago and never brought it up or condemned them for it on his huge platform.
If you're trying to throw shade at LMG, he confirmed they would be talking about it on the WAN show (this friday)
@@antolepage26after initially finding out about it and not telling anyone, AND THEN worked with another sponsor that literally works the same way LMAO
@@antolepage26you saying that like he found out last night not years ago🙄
@@antolepage26 Hmm. I wonder why.
The really sad part is that all these influences helped Honey amass over 17 million users, which are now _ALL_ affecting every single person who has affiliate links because every time one of those 17 million users clicks on _anyones_ affiliate link to buy something, Honey is stealing the sale.
@@bluegizmo1983 Honey is stealing the sale and also deciding whether you get the highest discount code or one that benefits them more than giving you the best deal.
Hey honey is like cancer which you cant take out 😂
lmao yeah so sad here let me play my tiny little violin for them lmaoooooooo
Not only that but they aren't giving you the highest value for the coupon because that is the deal with the partner companies and sometimes they put a 60%reduction for the product even if the seller NEVER proposed in their history such product price cut
Ahh but that's NOT all. The same team that sold Honey for 20 billions to Paypal is proposing now the newest scam "PIE" extension that will show you only what commercials you want and they will give you some money for that. More details on Upper Echelon channel, the video is called "Exposing the"PIE" Influencer Disaster.
@@konflict1231 Lmao
Some people claimed this years ago. But finaly its going viral.
Honey is done for.
Yep I’ve seen a couple videos about it that were posted years ago.
Markiplier talked about it 4 years ago
My biggest gripe now is that there's not much evidence of theft. They've been caught with the method. But in court, prosecutors also need to prove how much has been rerouted. Honey's cookie method hides a lot of this evidence, so it's up to the prosecutors to ask Honey to disclose their financials, which is likely going to be obfuscated with losses Hollywood-accounting style.
I doubt it. There's a lot of terrible things we thought we were done with. Just look at the last decade of politics.
nothing will happen to honey, this is fake manufactured outrage by these influencers cause theyre butthurt about their precious little affiliate links. No one actually cares. The real consumers will continue to use it
Funnily enough, ever since PayPal bought Honey, I felt like the coupon plugin didn’t work as well as it used to
this, it was good before, after paypal bought it i barely got any fkn coupons.
That being said honey DID save me thousands of dollars, but now i feel cheated as they basicly screwed everyone to get those discounts
I feel the same. I used to get good coupons all the time and then it just stopped.
It NEVER functioned as it was advertised because it is clearly stated in their partnership program that if you join you WILL CONTROL the price.
Even funnier is that PayPal belongs is one of Musk's companies. What better way to get even richer than stealing other peoples money without them even noticing.
Definitely stopped working as well when PayPal bought them, I remember it use to be better and I would get more cash back points but now I only get a discount code every once in a while 😢
1:37 No. It quite literally does not do what it advertises. The sponsors all say you will get the BEST deal. And you will not. There's better deals online but the shops partner with Honey to give you a lower promo code based on what they set it to, in exchange for a 3% store commission
He covers that around 6:31
@@d3stiny117 yeah but he shouldn't have said it in the first place tho, edit it out
Honey basically strong hold shops and brands into partnering with them or they will dig up your 90% off coupon, imo that’s just a type of gangsters protection racket, pay up or we will ruin your business
Even the Megalag video says sometimes it does work fully as intended, which is weird. He showed a coupon code of him getting a $35 item for free. So, hey, sometimes it does work.
Yeah he covers that. Maybe next time watch the video before commenting.
So, honey can go bad? Another lie we've been told. -_-
Sike, was bad probably since the beginning
@@Ok-kf8xg The joke was Honey, the Food item, Dosent go bad.
yeah, honey going bad? You cant bee serious.
@@demise1 it uhm. It ferments into mead.
it saves us money lmao
It’s not just honey. It’s PayPal. So if no influencers work with PayPal anymore then it might hurt them more. They don’t call them the PayPal mafia for no reason
ebay / paypal.
wont ever stop man
There's NO WAY! Honey found a cupon for me when Ive bought my land in Scotland to become a Lord, and for my personal therapist on Better Help...also on Keeps to keep my hair when im angry cause i lose in World of Tanks. But i always use my Raycon earbuds which ive bought with a honey discount. 😢
"it works, it does what it advertises" - no it literally doesnt, that was the whole point of megalag's video, it purposefully omitted better coupons that existed and that you could find yourself if you tried while claiming it did the searching for you to find the best coupon....."I hope this is a lesson for you" - really? I hope this is a lesson for youtubers to vet their sponsors better for the sake of their viewers.....
Was about to call BS on this myself. I had this shit app for about a year. It never saved me any money, never had any codes that worked. I got rid of it years ago.
Oh now @austinevans media person out here deleting comments. Nice.
But if you did "vet" them you would have found nothing... Like you said that was the whole point of MegaLag's video... NO ONE KNEW (well a couple people worked it out) but it took a multi year investigation to truly uncover all of this...
Almost any content creator would have thought they were legit because there wasnt a whole "hey this is dodgy" discussion around this, I dont think anyone really knew the extent of the scam
It does sometimes, even Megalag said that towards the end. But it looked like he's going to do a follow up video regarding that. Personally it worked for me when I first had it (it even got me 20% off a $400 item), but for awhile now I did notice I had been able to find better codes on my own just searching for a few minutes. I thought Honey just got lazy, now I know it was more nefarious than that.
Influencers who get their bag will just do damage control and not really try and make themselves look bad by offering any real apology. Because the next scam that comes along they will take that bag too without doing any research beforehand. “It works” is hilarious because apparently Austin hasn’t actually paid attention to what the criticism is lol
It always seemed to good to be true + I was lazy to ever do it lmao
i tried it twice never saved any money, uninstalled it.
there was one time i order papa johns online for a group and it was like $55, honey somehow brought it down to like $20, i was kinda blown away. Then it never worked again lol
I was too poor and the coupons never worked so i un-installed it lmao 😂😂😂
I tried it. It added to many steps for check out lol. So I gave up and deleted it. I much rather use creator code at checkout then whole web browser extension.
@@sopcannon i used it and it worked for me like 3 times, tbf i was buying pricey stuff so maybe thats why, wouldnt be surprised that for cheap items it doenst do anything
We have been trying to highlight the problem with honey for years but as a small channel not many people listened or shared the information, glad the truth is finally coming out to the mainstream
I look at all videos even small channels i never seen anything about honey till saw Megalag's video
@@rory-red when it got really popular just before the covid era we noticed that our own affiliate stats suddenly went down the toilet and it coincided with the massive push from honey advertising and larger channels recommending it. We noticed that the honey extension was killing off affiliate links to other channels we were trying to support and highlighted this in our live streams as a heads up to viewers that like to support creators that honey was stealing links.
yeah as they relazied they werent making money lol
@@themadmoderator8465 yeah it’s true, it seemed like a cool thing until it wasn’t
"It does what it advertises" ummm it evidently doesn't? It promises to find you the 'best deal' which has been exposed as NOT true.
The comments are insane, "surprised this hasn't been talked about sooner" "I would never use this blah blah blah" "if it's too good to be true" took a dude several years to discover and investigate this, all of a sudden everyone acting like they're above it and knew the entire time. This isn't about you.
It's about your mother. We all call her Honey.
Exactly, money speaks louder then our safety.
Classic example of hindsight is 20/20
cause i never install free javascript extensions that earns millions, its pretty obviously sus
@@chinesesparrows Do you look into the earning reports for every extension you install? 😂
Can’t imagine this gets too far without a class action lawsuit of some type
Well, if everyone stops using them, then they WILL be gone.
"We're suing honey because it didn't do things the way we assumed it did". They've done nothing illegal, the whole premise was that it searched the web for promocodes which weren't given to you and therefore not yours but now people have a problem with it might hurt content creators
@@jamesinnitbruvyou mean stealing money from affiliates for doing nothing? Do you take the tips off the tables of waiters before they get there also?
@@jamesinnitbruv Collusion with companies is a crime, not to mention false advertising
@@chadhowell1328they're not stealing affiliates, it's the user who click on honey to find promo codes who give permissions. If anything it's the users who are giving the revenue to honey instead of creators.
Honey is gone. Unfair practices even if it were to benefit me is unacceptable.
Honey is here to stay. I do not care that rich people are losing money. This really does not seem like an issue that the common man should care about. It should be resolved in court between other rich people
Honey is also misleading consumers; its claim of offering the best deals is a lie, as its partner sellers manipulate the deals offered.
Never trust youtube ads
Except according to TH-cam, you cannot do anything about it.
Yeah, the feds would like a word with TH-cam and Google on their anti-ad blocker crusade, because this is going too far.
Never believe anything a youtuber or social media person promotes and you wont be scammed and wont help scam others.
It’s good to get a plugin that skips over their in-video ads. Let’s hope that they don’t get corrupted
I just wanted to thank you for making this video. Many people don't realize how much a video like this can hurt the channel in the long run, so ... props and huge respect for doing this!
8:39 It's not just influencers who partner with Honey, It's any and all influencers who use affiliate links.
I'm uninstalling honey right now
Leave a bad review before uninstalling please. Help other be aware.
1:23 No, it doesn't work, I NEVER had it find a coupon that actually worked.
it did for me
It's very hit or miss
I have had it find codes worked for me
It’s worked for me
Same here, I think of the hundreds of purchases I've made, it only actually worked once. Not due to my niche hobbies and purchases, I've also used it plenty of times on mainstream websites like Walmart and Amazon. It just never helped other than like one time on g2a of all places lmao.
Austin my man, it literally doesn't work the way it advertises... it rigged both ends of the coupon system... we the end users aren't saving any more than we would've had they not existed.. it also poisons the well for other creators.
Doesn’t look like you finished the video or paid attention.
I don’t appreciate that he said that, but he does show later in the video that he understands the problem and why it’s not in fact as advertised. I guess he meant it does find promo codes, just not the “best” promo code?
@@norgafThat’s kind of the point though. The way he frames it for people who don’t watch all the way to the end - most YT viewers - the message is “this affected creators but it’s still great for you the consumer.”
It’s like when fine print directly contradicts the claim.
Even the Megalag video says sometimes it does work fully as intended, which is weird. He showed a coupon code of him getting a $35 item for free. So, hey, sometimes it does work.
Literally 😵💫
7:32 the way I understood the source video wasn’t so much that Honey was shaking down stores/businesses but more like they we’re facilitating the deals that were less beneficial to the consumer. In other words it felt more like the stores themselves wanted only the “eh” coupons to be shown so that they would reap more profits. Honey is still scummy in this scenario but it also shows that businesses themselves aren’t always looking out for the consumer either (obvious fact but wanted to clarify it anyways).
megalags part2 video is going to be about the shakedowns i think
i don't get it. so why dont stores just dont make any large discount codes? dont they have control over those?
@@rahbabchowdhury4504 as far as i am understanding that are special codes like 10 year customer and should not leaked to the public. Honey now only shows this codes if you are not a partner otherwise honey controls the coupons.
Everything promoted by influencers is at best useless garbage and at worst a scam. I use sponsorblock and I'm not sorry.
For example HelloFresh which seemed nice, is being sued for using child labor. Sponsorblock definitely seems like a necessary extension now to avoid these horrible companies.
@@renegeeder I mean, it's not that necessary, you can manually skip it.
This is why i watch you austin your humbleness, willingness to admit wrong, and coverage and explanation of everything is A Plus material. Youre honest and youre human we all make mistakes even if we dont know we're making them
This is why I have sponsor block to skip those sponsered segments. As much as I want to trust my favorite content creator with whatever they advertise to me, there have been multiple instances where what they advertised are either shady or straight up scams.
This is why I use an ad blocker. Whenever aTuber promotes anything, I immediately skip or ignore the ad. I pay for TH-cam Premium to avoid seeing ads altogether because almost every advertisement is entirely irrelevant to me.
The more a company tries to push a product, the more likely it's garbage or nefarious. Plus you know if they're spending a lot on marketing, there's less spent on the actual product.
I highly respect you Austin for you for looking out for smaller creators and everyone in general
In what way is he looking out for smaller creators? He still said the extension worked and "did what it advertises" which it clearly didn't. In the video he sounded like he knew about the fishy affiliate link thing when he the sponsorship 3 YEARS ago. Yet he isn't being called out for not letting ppl know like another ytuber I know so good looking out there.
@@BigT87 dawg chill out, it does save money in certain cases, and he was transparent with everything
@@Ducky0101bro is still defending them lowkey "it does what it advertises" no no it doesn't. So really he only cared HE lost his cut 😂
I stopped using honey 8 years ago. I knew I wasnt benefiting from them at all.
everyone on youtube doing damage control
But us as the end user got discounts. The creators just didn't make money off us.
@@turbot_ Only, we didn't get the best discounts like they say we will. Watch the video again to get a full understanding of what is going on.
@@turbot_ I get that you care only about the end price and dont care about money the affiliates make as long as you get to save, but please understand that you are NOT actually saving money because they are intentionally HIDING better coupons from you that you could easily find in 1 google search, that's the biggest problem with honey
I wouldn’t say damage control. Everyone is realising this, even creators!
He dares to say "it works, it does what they say" while it doesn't do what they say!! lol
Literally the video explains it.
Honey also mostly uses web scraping methods to collect these coupons which is not illegal but it is unethical as it can increase server load, and as a result causing performance issues for the websites.
Anytime a product is free,you (the consumer) are the product.
Honey is the real face of paypal. This is why i stopped doing business with them a while ago
You couldn't get around PayPal for most online shops if you from the EU since most people didn't have a credit card, but now most banks include a credit card function with you normal bank card
Honey was likely doing this before PayPal bought them, still PayPal continued it.
Thanks for the transparency 🔥
These fiascos prove that these influencers and content creators should call for more ad regulation. The influencers, except the biggest ones, lack the resources to vet these advertisers adequately. They need help. Otherwise these embarassing situations will keep popping up, making youtubers and tiktokers look like jackasses in perpetuity. Just recently in the PC hardware space, we had NZXT, and now greater TH-cam has Honey. And we get these awkward apology-lite videos from the content creators
NZXT is not the same case, these youtubers could have gotten all that information by actually looking throught the website and weighing what the value proposition is, instead they just decided to take the money and parrot the talking points without a single critical thought, its not the same thing. Government is always slow on regulations, and do you think that a lot of these influencer would just wait around when money are on the table, a lot of them already promote obvious placebos and straight up scams?
To be fair I think more people on the back end who are managing these sponsorships for influencers should educate themselves on other marketing methods. If they had understood affiliate marketing more they’d have likely known that this is what Honey, Retail Me Not, Rakuten, etc have been doing for decades.
Everything they peddle is either an outright scam or they get a kick back. Can't trust any of it.
Impressive to see you addressing this so quickly. Thanks for sharing, Austin.
Almost like he is trying to hide something....
He addresses it but then lies about it actually doing what it advertises.
Penguinz0 was first with addressing this and was more clear about it, now these youtubers do it and only to get views.
@@SupremepikachuMegaLag was first to report it.
@@LinoBarraza Never said he was the first one who found out... I was talking about him addressing this from MegaLag and now all the others are doing it because it gets them views.
What does that teach us? If there are any sponsorships or advertising on social media it could be a scam.
All this is good, but the actual question is, as youtubers, are you and the others going to sue them or not because you obviously already got paid for the sponsorship?
Honestly that sponsorship probably ended up with them losing more money than they made for the ad.
good to see you talk about this straight up and open, all the best Austin!
Literally watched the video on the bloke yesterday who exposed it. Sad that the influencers didn’t whistle blow when they’d realised… maybe ashamed?
Literally 😵💫
LTT moment
Or maybe they didn't realize? I mean they were the ones losing affiliate revenue and end consumer(well at first) didn't really lose anything. And the part where they force businesses, how do you know when this started happening, I'd say before PayPal buyout they were too small to force anything on anyone.
@@testtest8399the original video addressed this. Lmg learned about the affiliate link stuff and dropped them
The real problem is that honey steals money from creators that never even promoted honey. I could careless about the creators that promoted honey.
PayPal needs to be sued.
Very insightful Austin, good on you being real to the fans
Ur vids have gotten me thru some dark times, hope to see many more in the future :)
I never understood what their business model was.
I just assumed it was the regular customer data reselling.
Back when I used to place orders for customers when I worked in a call center, I would always use Honey to scan for coupon codes to apply to peoples orders, but I never knew how awful those scammers were 😮.
I've never had Honey work, had it installed for a bit, it never once found a coupon so I removed it after a while, haven't bothered touching it since
Makes me feel old that "back in the day" now means 2012 and 2013
I'd be interested to know if the Microsoft Edge native coupon thing also does this, it sometimes recommends available coupons or even just telling you "there's a cheaper seller on Amazon". Granted it's not as intrusive as Honey but I'm guessing it has a similar concept.
Of course it does. Do you think it's going to give you discounts for free? Microsoft wants money, they want users, they cloned the concept. Users save and are relatively happy - so they're more likely to continue using edge, and Microsoft makes some of that money along with the data garnered by their users shopping habits.
@@novanightmare6289 do you have evidence beyond "company wants money"
@@novanightmare6289here we have another guy throwing out baseless rumors to try and farm internet points
Plausible deniability in action:
Jimmy Donaldson has a lot to explain
Bro are you listening? It scams youtubers more than the consumers
he doesn't care, in his opinion screw other creators and their communities.
Yes, I'm sure this is the biggest scandal he's involved in at the moment...
@irishlad1367 he's still a scammer himself
@irishlad1367 it scams both, you think you're getting a deal but a lot of the time there's a significantly better deal that they're not telling you about
I'm so very glad a big channel and company like y'all are taking about this. It's so important that content creators speak out about this situation and stop these shady companies from abusing us.
influencers: worked with honey and found out its a scam. Also influencers: we kept quiet about this scam even after we found out and stopped using it.
I respect you for making this video. A lot of creators that probably should, will stay quiet about it. That shows a lack of respect toward their audience. Thanks for being a good person.
I got rid of it years ago... I never once was able to find any deals through them.
Thanks Austin for making this. I had been meaning to watch the OG video from mega but hadn't gotten around to it yet. Appreciate your transparency
Honey was stealing a lot of of honey from others, sucks that they had the cojones to do some bull like this.
Cojones? Destroyer in the username? Are you puertorrican? 🇵🇷
not honey, PAYPAL.
i suggest a banking license for paypal and i bet you, the next day paypal will be history.
if people are coming to look into paypals books, it WILL be a mess.
Good for you. I always shrug when I see Honey sponsorships. Almost anything that claims to help you while being free or cheap is conning somebody in one way or another.
i miss the days where sponsors only sold products like TVs or furniture...
Super shady and insane... just uninstalled it 😢
You’ve vastly missed the point to take away here. You as an influencer owe it to your viewers to fully vet every opportunity that you take. You, and hundreds of other large TH-camrs failed at that and just took the money and ran. It just so happens in this case, you got got just as much as your viewers got got this time around. Do better. All of TH-cam, do better.
I saw a youtuber do a Raid Shadow Legends ad and shit on the game later in the same video lol. Most influencers don’t care what it is they advertise as long as they get paid, sadly.
@ Exactly, and that’s the problem. They’re already selling out their audience. They might as well take that rug pull crypto or CA skin casino money. I bet they think they’re better than that though.
The only reason this Honey one has blown up is because these creators screwed themselves in this. How many explanation/apology videos like this have you seen for BetterHelp?
I’m glad you addressed this
cant imagine how much money y'all lost to earn a bit of money from a sponsor
Think of how much money Jimmy and Linus cost Austin over the years.
What?! TH-camrs were unknowingly pushing a scam? How could it be?
The sponsorships felt like a scam and I typically avoided channels promoting it because it made the channel seem super shady.
Perhaps TH-camrs didn’t know they were being scammed but I find it absolutely ridiculous TH-camrs didn’t know they were pushing a scam on their viewers.
Honey has never worked for me once
Me neither
Same. Literally 0% success rate and one had it installed for well over 2 years
I watched the doc yesterday . I never installed honey, but I had a capital one and Rakuten installed. Never actually got a good deal on either, but after seeing what honey did, I could only assume they do the same, and both are now uninstalled.
I use Rakuten and get amazing deals so to each their own i suppose. Most recent one was 90% off on my yearly vpn subscription and I believe it was 15% off my hotel stay with IHG. I have them transferred out as AMEX points. Consumers haven't been hurt in any way but do what you think u gotta do.
he's teasing a video where for some reason honey is offering / showing promo codes that aren't supposed to be broadcasted, or are expired or whatever, where you can get as much as 100% off the purchase price. That's so fucked up. I wonder if honey is doing it intentionally.
I think the second video is going to blow up the internet
Does Honey also claims a referral code even if you don't come from a previous promoter? Lets say a customer wants to buy something and no-one referred the product. Does Honey claims they referred/promoted the product anyways, and if they do so, would it be considered stealing from the companies themselves?
Yes, if they have a referral code for that website, and you use their extension, you are making them the referrer.
how would they be stealing from the business when it's the business itself that gave them the referral? referral isn't automatic, it's businesses that give it to honey
Winnie The Pooh Lied
I'm waiting for LMG to respond to this situation. I actually got Honey because of them and used it on their affiliate links to Amazon. I did that intentionally to support LMG years ago. I wonder how long this has been happening and I really hope there is a class action lawsuit against them.
Wow always thought honey was good
umm no.
that makes sense why i would be able to find better coupon codes on my own rather then using honey's codes
You must take the responsibility! You dont advertise to the customers what you dont know.
but it isn't his fault. If he knew what they were doing he would have said something but nobody knew in honey's 6 years of popularity
Thats exactly my thoughts......
Consumer needs to take accountable at supporting and buying products without doing their research
@ Content creators need to take responsibility for what they advertise. We follow them because we trust their recommendations, not to investigate every product they promote. If we had to research everything ourselves, we wouldn’t have time to enjoy their content.
@@dessol4362 Endorsing is different than advertising, When a TH-camr says "I use honey, or I recommend honey", it's an endorsement and they share part of the responsibility
This is the worst.
Scripted video ever ever TH-camrs Who's talking about it saying yeah, I used it in the past.That's why I did the sponsorship with them
At least this isn't the raycons, literally a scam
But it's literally a scam, They collude with sellers to make you have a lesser discount than manually adding a cupon
Are raycons a scam? I hadn't heard that one.
this is a literally scam tho?
Raycon is just okay product for an okay price
@gloriousapplebees they're essentially dropshipped headphones that are inflated in price yet marketed as being affordable by "cutting out the middle man". They arent bad, but you can purchase similar, or better, products for far cheaper if you purchase directly from moondrop or other chinese companies.
Not a scam, and quite clever marketing, but kinda scummy
With all the scams going on, I’m not in the right head space. Good thing I’ve got BetterHelp!
At this point, I just blanket assume anything that is a massive sponsor on hundreds of channels is a scam or bad in some other way. It just keeps happening.
and this is why you never listen to any youtubers sponsors. lol
No clue why people used the extension to begin w/. At a minimum it was nothing more than a tracker. Why would you allow this?
If this is such a problem... CONTACT THE FTC.
I dont think its illegal, just immoral
I installed it years ago and remembering it just did not work and I could never find anyone talking about this but glad it’s finally going viral
Uhm.. That crumb on the corner of his mouth...
Good lesson to learn for the future Austin. It's not enough to know "if" the company or product/service works, you should also look more into "how" it works so you don't get end up repeating past mistakes.
Linus's silence is deafening at the moment.
If you watched the MegaLag video, then you'd know they've already talked about this years ago. Granted it was just in a form post, but they weren't silent about it.
@@_DewGamingthe problem is that, while its good they discovered the scam and broke away from honey, they did not warn anybody. LTT has a huge reach and should feel compelled to warn about shady companies as they find out they are scamming…they did not do this. An answer on a low view forum post is not a warning, and then they also partnered with a similar company pulling the same crap after the fact. They need to answer to this, as they could have saved creators and consumers from the scam that honey is.
@@_DewGamingthat wasn’t Linus. That was Colton. Try to keep up.
@@spellfireforge so Linus is the only one in all of LMG that's allowed to speak about things like this?
@_DewGaming I think you're missing the point he has been oddly silent since this video came out. My bet is they are hoping that if they ignore it that it will just fade away. A forum post addressing it was pretty weak he has a huge ass platform why didn't they cover it in a video when they found out? Nope they instead chose to put out a weak forum post that probably 80% or more of his viewers never saw.
Honey is also taking your data, my data everyone else's data and selling it to anyone who wants to pay for it
That's a lot more money than some affiliate codes.
Let's not forget the one creator who knew and didn't say anything: LTT
I was just thinking the same thing. Several youtubers have covered the video that released a couple days ago yet nothing from Linus but crickets chirping
They did mention it in a post. I actually blame redditors not getting that info mainstream 😩
@@Ok-kf8xg The post was "hidden" in the LTT forums. A 5 minutes video in any of their channels would have made enough noise to let people know. Also a lot of people installed that thing because of them, seems fair.
About time influences got scammed instead of scamming their fans, feel bad for the good ones tho
I know I had honey. It helped save me a bit, but most of the times I couldn't find any type of deals. It really didn't seemed like it worked.
PIE the ad blocker as well "which is the same company" and they don't hide it. PIE hurts creators since it replaces Google & TH-cam Ads with PIE's own ads so they reap the reward while the creator gets ZERO and you still have to watch and AD.
I'm glad you standing up against people that take advantage of others 👏 💯
Removed when i saw the video. I was shocked and cannot believe how sneaky Honey is.
LOL I thought honey was stealing crazy data or something, but they were just scamming the influencers out of their affiliate kickbacks?
your a tech guy who has been way more familiar with this stuff than most if not all of us. that's all you were aware of? come on.......
edit: after watching the rest of the video... really? no apology? take your money and make a short video to take the blame off you and run with the cash ok
If something is free then you’re the product
I'm glad many of you guys have enough integrity to acknowledge it and tell your audiences. I mean, it hardly effects them but still, it's nice. I do think influencers have GOT to be more careful with who they take sponsorships from. It's getting old. What will eventually happen is people will value your word for a sponsorship less and less, and then its bye bye money once the brands realize that. Your face, your word, your image is your living.
Thank you for addressing this. Respect.
Bro a lesson for us???? A lesson for you! Without you i never knew about honey in the first place!