MegaLag's Honey Expose Has Now Cost the Extension 7M Users

A Second Video, a Bigger Reckoning

When YouTuber MegaLag published his original investigation into PayPal’s Honey browser extension in December 2024, the coupon-finding tool was sitting comfortably at more than 20 million Chrome users and roughly 35,000 merchant partnerships. A year and a half later, those numbers tell a very different story.

On August 11, MegaLag returned with a follow-up video titled “Honey Gets Terminated as Lawsuits Proceed,” pulling together the full scope of damage done since his original expose. According to the investigation, Honey has lost seven million Chrome users, dropping to approximately 12 million as currently listed on the Chrome Web Store. Merchant partnerships have shrunk from around 35,000 to just over 28,000. The extension’s available coupon codes have fallen from roughly 90,000 to 50,000, and MegaLag claims at least 10,000 of those remaining codes have already expired.

The original allegation was pointed: MegaLag argued that Honey was not just finding shoppers the best deals, it was quietly replacing creators’ affiliate tracking links with its own at checkout. That meant Honey collected the commission on a sale that a creator’s recommendation had actually driven. PayPal pushed back at the time, saying Honey operated within standard industry practices, specifically last-click attribution, where whichever referral is most recent gets the credit.

Affiliate Networks Cut Ties

The fallout moved well beyond user counts. Rakuten Advertising removed Honey from its network in January 2026, a cut that cost the extension access to approximately 2,000 retailers at once, as reported by Dexerto. Impact.com suspended Honey’s account and pulled it from its marketplace. Awin Group went further, confirming that Honey had breached its publisher policies and suspending both payments and access to new advertiser programs.

Rakuten eventually reinstated Honey, but only after building out a new system specifically designed to stop extensions from overwriting existing affiliate tracking. The reinstatement itself is something of a backhanded verdict: if new safeguards were necessary, the old setup was clearly a problem worth fixing.

Legal proceedings are continuing alongside the reputational fallout. MegaLag’s August video title references lawsuits proceeding, though the source material does not detail the specific claims or parties involved at this stage.

What This Means for Creator Trust

The Honey situation has always been about more than coupon codes. It sits at the intersection of creator monetization and the browser tools millions of everyday shoppers use without much thought. Affiliate revenue is genuinely meaningful income for a huge range of creators, from large channels to mid-tier reviewers who built audiences around honest product recommendations. The idea that a trusted browser tool might have been quietly redirecting that income landed hard.

MegaLag’s first video spread widely in part because it gave creators a concrete, easy-to-follow explanation of something many had suspected but could not clearly articulate. The second video functions as a receipt. The seven million users who left were not just reacting to drama. They were making a deliberate choice after learning how the product worked.

For Honey, the question now is whether 12 million remaining users and a restructured relationship with Rakuten are enough of a foundation to rebuild on, or whether the trust problem is structural. Losing a third of your user base and roughly 7,000 merchant partners in under two years is a significant hole to climb out of, especially when the lawsuits are still pending.