‘I’m suing Honey’: From revolutionary to an outright thief, the Honey YouTuber sponsorship scam, explained

There is a golden rule that one should be aware of and always keep on the back of one’s mind in this digital age: If you are not paying for a product or a service, you are the thing that’s being sold. Think of social media apps, like Instagram for instance, these are capitalizing on your attention. Their permanent objective as a business model is to use whatever tools they have at their disposal to retain your attention on the app regardless of whether that’s healthy for its users.

Even before this principle – or how web browser extensions can potentially track your data – was as well established in my mind, I was never fully persuaded into installing Honey by the many YouTubers I followed – from PewDiePie to Gibi ASMR – who took the sponsorship deal. Honey, in theory, sounded like the best thing since sliced bread: A free browser extension that would save you money by helping you find the best deals possible, so you did not have to go through the hassle of searching for a discount coupon. It sounded so amazing that a nagging part of me felt it was too good to be true.

Indeed, we can see there was a reason – now more blatant than ever – why PayPal would purchase Honey for a whopping $4 billion in 2020.

The Honey sponsorship trap

In 2020, Markiplier – someone who’ll always have my utmost respect and admiration even if I don’t watch his videos as religiously anymore – was quite possibly the first YouTuber to sound out his distrust of Honey. He told his audience that he’d never taken the proposed sponsorship deals because he could not begin to tell how Honey made its profits, enough profits to “push so much advertising” and pay – what we can surmise are significant amounts of money – to countless influencers for them to promote their product.

This goes to show how asking the right questions – such as “Where’s all that money coming from?” – can often save you from falling for this kind of deception. But, to be fair, it might not have been easy to discern the lies. The YouTubers themselves got duped because, as Marques Brownlee said in his video reacting to scam accusations against his former sponsor, Honey was a very “YouTube-forward” company that was easy to work with and word got around among influencers that they were a desirable advertiser. So, before you get upset at the creators who promoted Honey to their viewers, remember: They were, allegedly, not only misled but also ripped off.

As Hank Green said in his own YouTube video, brand deals can be the main source of revenue for certain creators, and “it can be easy not to think too hard about how things work.” But, thankfully, MegaLag decided to start “thinking hard” about how Honey’s business model works and conducted a years-long investigation. What he uncovered shocked everyone – except for you, Mark, you absolute gem.

How Honey is accused of unethically operating

As MegaLag made clear in his thorough exposé, the way Honey presented itself made it so they were attractive to businesses, creators, and the average consumer. While they would make it seem to consumers and creators like they would be saving money, to businesses Honey would tell them something that would benefit them, for instance, how they could better control the consumer’s journey as, at the end of the day, Honey would only present the coupons the business wanted to appear or none at all.

On the other hand, the creators, especially those who relied on affiliate link commissions, were getting their commissions claimed by Honey. Without doing any heavy lifting, the little Honey tab would pop in at the end of a purchase and, regardless of whether it had any discount coupons to offer, would seek to get that last page click necessary to overwrite the affiliate links with their own attribution codes so that they would get to pocket the commission money.

YouTuber Theo Rant, who’s also a developer, has an interesting theory regarding big online retailers like Amazon. Since Amazon is so strict with its affiliate policies and harsh to those who step out of line in the slightest – namely content creators – it would be almost unthinkable that they’d allow Honey, who’s almost certainly violating those same policies, to get that much money at their expense. Unless, as Theo argues, Honey and Amazon have a special deal that would make it so it also compensated Amazon. It is also not a stretch to think that Amazon was not the only corporation Honey made special deals with so they wouldn’t step on the wrong toes.

One commenter on Theo’s comment section pointed out something I hadn’t thought of: “That’s why I HATED WITH PASSION that browsers started hiding full URLs. This is exactly what was bound to happen.” Because, with the full URLs, we could openly perceive Honey overriding the commission codes in real-time.

Needless to say, MegaLag’s revelation of how shady Honey’s methodology is did not fly with anyone, neither consumers nor creators. One such YouTube content creator who has, thankfully, inserted himself into the situation is everyone’s favorite YouTube lawyer Devin, best known as Legal Eagle, who, on Jan. 2, 2025, dropped a video with a very short and sweet title (pun intended): “I’m suing Honey.”

That’s right, Legal Eagle has swooped in “on behalf of creators everywhere” and has filed a class action lawsuit. Honey, Legal Eagle “will see you in court” and the rest of us will sit back and watch Karma get to work – by “Karma,” we don’t mean the other similar coupon discount extension.

On Jan. 3, 9to5Google reported that Honey had lost about 3 million Chrome users in the few days since the scam allegations came to light. We can reasonably infer that more will follow as the dropping of MegaLag’s explosive video continues in its rippling effect.