Honey Got Features and What to Know

It is completely unacceptable that Honey are acting in this sort of way. I will under no circumstances work with Honey ever again. Imagine a sponsor that claims to help you get great deals online only to be allegedly swiping commissions from the very YouTubers they were sponsoring. That's the story of Honey, and it was a huge deal. The Megalag video exposing them got 19 million views. But since then, things have kind of gotten worse. Now, I'll admit I was one of the creators caught up in the drama as I did a couple of sponsorships with Honey back in 2021. It was an embarrassing miss. Now, I did make a video about the situation and it has led us to taking a more careful look

at potential sponsors. This also opened a much bigger can of worms because watching YouTube in 2026, it's hard not to see sponsorships absolutely everywhere. And I think there's a real reason for that ties directly into the rise and fall of Honey and how sponsorships on YouTube have changed forever. Okay, so what is Honey? Well, their business model seemed pretty simple. Install the browser extension and it would pop up with promo codes before you check out all over the web. But behind the scenes, they were inserting themselves in the middle of a massive chain of events that drives shopping online. Say you're watching one of my old PC builds. Well, in the description you'll find links to the parts I used, which are all affiliate

links. Now, these are fairly simple. Click on one and you get sent to Amazon with my affiliate code to let Amazon know that I'm the one who referred you. If you check out, Amazon pays a small percentage to me for referring the sale. Simple enough. But Honey was supposedly swiping creators affiliate links at the last second, even if they didn't actually find you a promo code. So, you can see why Megalag's video blew up. He exposed how creators like me were happily promoting Honey, a tool that was actually swiping money out of our own pockets, allegedly. Now, PayPal, who bought Honey for $4 billion, have largely stayed quiet about things since the scandal broke. But the good news is

that a number of creators, including Windover Productions and Legal Eagle, have filed a big class action lawsuit in federal court. So, surely Honey was held responsible, right? Oh, wait. What's that? Oh. Oh, it's been 18 months and the lawsuit actually got thrown out and is just now starting to get back on track. Well, that's going great, isn't it? But this whole thing is a lot larger than just Honey. There are others in the same space, including Capital One Shopping. Yes, the Capital One Bank. So, their coupon extension got hit with the same allegation. However, they settled in December of 2025, of course, without admitting any wrongdoing for just $4 million. you know, probably their weekly

coffee budget. There are others, too. Microsoft have killed their coupon feature in Edge, and Google actually changed the rules for Chrome extensions to specifically ban swiping affiliate links unless they provide a quote direct and transparent benefit to the user. Basically, they had to write a rule that says you actually have to help someone before you take the money. So, here's the thing. A very fair point a lot of people have brought up is who cares? I mean, sure, there's some shady behavior, but these coupon extensions do largely work for you as a user, but let me show you something. This is every dollar Amazon has paid me in affiliate commissions for the last decade. Not

only has it almost entirely dried up, but I think this story explains a lot about why YouTube feels the way it does in 2026. Early YouTube was a very, very different place. In April of 2011, I had maybe 20,000 subscribers when I was accepted into the Amazon Associates program. This was a pretty big deal for me, and it quickly became a big portion of my income, mostly off the back of the many, many PC builds I did back then. It was a different time. Sponsor spots were barely a thing. And while YouTube did pay based on the ads they ran on my videos, it was a lot more minimal than it is these days. Just to put it in perspective, there was no such thing as a video ad back in 2011. They just put

the little banners on the side. Relying on the Amazon affiliate links felt like a win-win. I linked the parts I used in builds. It didn't cost you anything to click on them. I got a small percentage in commission. And most importantly, there was zero friction for you as the audience. If you didn't want to check out the links, they were buried in the description, completely out of sight. It has been 13 years, and I have never told the story about how all this absolutely blew up in my face. So, in June of 2013, I got an email from Amazon customer service. They claimed that I was violating their affiliate linking rules because I was using a link shortener that made it unclear I was linking to

Amazon. The shortener I used, Amazon.to, which is Amazon's own shortener. But sure, rules are rules. I wrote back in barely an hour and the email bounced back. The address that Amazon told me to respond to fix my account was a dead inbox and I was screwed. Now, for context, in this time, I had just moved out by myself, my own apartment, and Amazon and revenue, it was like 60, like maybe even 70% of my income. Like, YouTube was my full-time job, and I was doing well, but not well enough to lose 70% of my income overnight. Now, I unsuccessfully kept trying to contact Amazon, as you might imagine. But 12 days after the initial email, I got the termination. My account was closed. The

thousands of dollars they owed me in advertising fees were withheld, and that was it. No way to appeal, no one to talk to, no way to fix things. It was just gone. It wasn't just me. I had a chat with someone who knows a thing or two about being on YouTube since the prehistoric era. They said that I was violating their terms of service by offering something in exchange for people clicking on the links. And I said, "Well, what am I offering?" And they said, "Well, you're offering gratitude." And I was like, "What does that even mean?" All I said was, "If you use our link, it helps us out a lot." And they were like, "You can't do that." And I'm sitting here going, "That's crazy. I mean, here's all these other

creators that are doing exactly the same thing or in some cases even more explicitly offering something in return. As soon as that happened, I looked at it and I went, "Holy crap, I can't rely on this at all." It was around that time that we started really making serious investments into our own store, for instance. It's been a long time and yet the emotion of having over half of my income disappear overnight, it still feels the same as it did back then. But I will tell you it did teach me a valuable lesson. As a creator, you should never keep all of your eggs in one basket. Which is why this graph starts in 2016, as it took me nearly 3 years to get my account back up and running. Now, as you can see, it did

start popping pretty much immediately. Now, 2016, for context, was when the channel was really growing, and by February of 2017, I had my best month ever. $13,492 purely from those little affiliate links in the description. Right after this peak, the first crack, March of 2017, literally the next month, Amazon changed their commission structure, meaning that a lot of items started paying less than half of what they used to. And it just so happens that 2017 is also when extensions like Honey began to take off. Now, look, I am not telling you that Honey caused what happens next on this graph. It is a complicated story with a lot of moving pieces, but it feels like an interesting coincidence that my

revenue spiked from nothing to its peak within a few months, then began sliding as one of the biggest coupon extensions on earth was growing. From 2017 on, this line basically only goes in one direction. It had hald by 2019. It hd again in 2020, the biggest year for the channel ever. So, what happened? I mean, affiliate revenue used to be a huge part of our business. It's still measurable, but it's not like it used to be. It really did empower creators, in my opinion, to make the kind of content they wanted about whatever they wanted without worrying about whether there was uh, you know, any sponsorship dollars associated with it or any advertising dollars. Lennis and his team were kind

enough to share LT's actual Amazon affiliate numbers for the video. And while his numbers are much healthier than mine, it is the same trend. Since 2020, Linus Tech Tips Amazon affiliate revenue is down 70%. Lionus told me directly they have changed nothing about how they link. Same links in the description, same workflow, their audience went up and yet revenue is down 70%. But what happened over time was the affiliate dollars shrunk. Brands have stepped in wanting to kind of pay for placement for their products. And you're seeing that in multiple places. Like you see that on the sales platforms themselves where you go on Amazon these days and instead of their search results

and their recommendation engine being driven by, you know, what you're likely to be interested in or what might be the highest quality product. Instead, it's driven by who is buying advertising space on Amazon. Amazon isn't a shopping platform anymore. It's an advertising platform. And so, for that reason, um, you know, we still make videos where it's just here's a build guide and we're still going to throw an Amazon link down there because in spite of how much they've inshitified their affiliate program, they're still one of the best. We'll just make a fraction of what we used to on it. It seems clear to me that between Amazon steadily cutting their rates, and extensions like Honey

scooping up affiliate revenue, a stolen commission, and a lost sale look identical in your books, there's just less and less of a pie to go around. The issue is that I think a lot of the time it comes back to, you know, we have teams. Do you do we want those people to, you know, to be still be able to support themselves and their families? And sometimes the way that we find is a way that honestly I don't think is better for the audience. And I wish that as platforms we'd think about okay like what is best for the customer and not put creators in a position where they're sort of like scrambling trying

to find a new way to make up for what was a pretty good system before. So where does this whole thing leave us today? Well, last month Amazon paid me $12.51. Now, this chart is a bit more dramatic than Linus' because I've mostly stopped even bothering linking to Amazon at this point. But still, my single best month of 2017 made more than the last 3 years combined. Now, here's the thing about affiliates. They weren't just seamless to the audience. They were also transparent from a creator's perspective. I would link products I mentioned whether I like them or not. If you still want to check out some dumb gadget I talked about at Mystery Tech,

go right ahead. But importantly, these were not sponsored segments. There was no contact with the brands, no talking points, no hashtags, no approvals. But now that the affiliate safety net has largely disappeared, it has been replaced by sponsorships by thank you to the sponsor of this video, the Banjo Boys or other sponsors. It's funny, we've mostly just been getting the Banjo Boys sponsoring us lately. It's weird. I don't know why. It's uh maybe it's cuz I keep talking about sponsors. Huh. I'm not exaggerating when I say that sponsors quite literally pay the bills here at Overclock, but there's a trade-off. It varies between brands, but generally there's an extra layer that simply just wasn't there when creators

could rely on those innocuous little affiliate links in the description. And while you've heard a lot from Lionus and I, who've been doing this for a very, very long time, here's the perspective of someone who never got to experience the good old days at all. This is Betty from Switch and Click. She started her channel in 2020 in a world where Honey was already established. Currently, affiliate income makes for about 30% of our monthly revenue on average, but some months it's down to 10 or even as low as five, and other months it's as high as 50. Affiliates are very volatile. You're always at the mercy and the whims of the affiliate companies like Amazon or other retailers, but they're extremely

important for us since that's how we avoid doing fully sponsored content and instead opt for shorter midroll segments instead so we can make some more niche content and still keep the lights on. This is a creator with a real team in 2026 describing affiliate links as the thing standing between her channel and taking deals she doesn't want to have to do. So creators have adapted. Linus built his LTT store in large part because Amazon banned him too at one point. Most of us have leaned into sponsors, but I think this is the perfect time for everyone to remember the lesson that I had to learn the hard way when my Amazon got banned. As a creator, you are reliant on the

platforms you use. If Amazon or YouTube or Tik Tok want to change the rules, it's their platform. They can do what they want. You're just along for the ride. Now, Honey didn't kill affiliates. Neither did Amazon or their rate cuts or their dead inbox. It was really all of it. A system where every single party between a creator and their audience takes a bigger and bigger cut year after year until there's almost nothing left in the end. Now look, I've had 17 years to diversify the business. Largely because I got to build the channel in a much easier era than today. The creators who are starting out now do not have that luxury. So the next time a creator

starts an ad read that makes you roll your eyes, think about what you're looking at to create content at the scale of creators these days to actually be successful on YouTube. It's kind of the only option left. Thank you very much for watching. I want to give a special shout out to Lionus and Betty for sharing so much for the video as well as to Megalag for not only his initial videos but also for chatting with me and helping me to understand just how deep this world goes. And as always, my friends, if you enjoyed, make sure to subscribe to the channel and ringing that dingling because I'll promise you it makes a whole lot more of a difference than those Amazon affiliate links do at this point. This video is

sponsored by the Banjo Boys. Do you like banjo music? Do you like boys? Well, boy oh boy, have I got the greatest band for you.