Upper Echelon: After reading some of your comments regarding the thumbnail (being blah blah blah)... you have a wonderful command of the English language! Keep it up, this is how I deal with dipshittards in real life... 🙂 (PS: Merry Xmas!)
From what I am reading, this scheme is similar to Brave's BAT reward scheme where you'd get crypto tokens for being served anonimized ads. It did not take off.
The first major red flag to me was the fact that they were *aggressively* advertising their service Like...every other ad I got over the past couple of months has been Pie ads Why would a service that was made by someone who claims to "hate ads so much he dedicated his life to stopping them" push out ads so aggressively? And why would they offer to pay you to see ads if one of its creators claims to hate ads?
Don't forget the pitch of "you can get paid to watch them". If you hated ads so much, why would you simply provide a way to feed even more into the system of ads? Do you hate ads or do you want to encourage people to watch more? Make up your mind.
@@toolazytobeoriginal4587 It's an actual business. Some people will "watch" ads (turn it on and let it run) in exchange for points to redeem for gift cards or money on survey sites. There's a subreddit called beermoney about those things because it's extra money for hobbies. The Brave browser had/has, unsure the status, a similar thing where you could enable ads for some of their crypto in exchange. Some people will do it for the pocket change or because they're so used to zoning out ads that it's pure benefit.
Be a RUclipsr Advertise a scam Clutch your pearls Blame the company At this point it’s a known fact that sponsors are mostly scams. RUclipsrs will try to argue that they can’t keep making content if they don’t have sponsors but do nothing to vet sponsors. That’s like a crack dealer crying he can’t feed his family if he doesn’t keep selling crack. At what point do we realize that these RUclipsrs are the ones scamming. They know full well what they are advertising OR possibly even worse they have no idea what it is and have no problem getting paid to advertise it anyway.
2:31 Small detail since Megalag's video was published. That footer that says "Made in Los Angeles by the founding team that built Honey", has now been changed to "Proudly build in Los Angeles".
They changed the wording on their about page, swapping "previously created honey" with "originally created honey". They're clearly aware of the fallout and try to wiggle their way out in a Homer Simpson disappearing in a bush kind of way.
What's incredible about PIE is that the "% space saved" shows that it doesn't work as an ad blocker. How does it know the memory saved? Because it let the ad load before removing it. That's not how an ad blocker is supposed to work. It's supposed to catch the network request that would load the ad and cancel it.
@@shlep444 What their saying is, the ad gets blocked before it even accesses your memory. It's knocking at the door of your router and the ad blocker is telling the knocker to go away without opening the door where the memory is at. So you can't "calculate" how much space that ad would have taken up in memory because it was never let in the door to be measured.
I haven't looked at it specifically in ages, but I do recall websites breaking if you didn't fully load the ad at the very least, thus requiring to load it first and then skipping it
I remember seeing an ad from Mr. Beast telling kids to go to every computer of their family in their home to install Honey. Talk about invasive and predatory.
They wer scamming the Creators and Not the Costumer lol. Calling MrBeast out even If EVERY other RUclipsr Like Charly (Pinguinzo) wer also taking the same Sponsor is Just Not fair. Creators scamming the Fans for Years. -RAID SHADOW LEGENDS! -Displate -Raycon And so many more. 90% of Sponsors are Scammers
Yea. The problem is that no one knew that honey is a scam. But same telling kids to go to every computer they know to install something is predatory and ugly
Oh wow, I have a feeling they told him to say that in the ad script because it’s so specific to what they needed to maximise the affiliate money they could poach. That request is not something people say unless they know they need it on as many computers as possible, otherwise it’s just a weird thing to tell people. They probably had it in the script disguised as a bad joke
When I launch my channel I’m not going to do ad reads, I’m just going to sell merch, only my merch isn’t going to be mass produced garbage. I’ve been working on a trading card game for a couple years, that’ll probably be among the first things I sell. And I already print my own t-shirt designs so my t-shirts won’t be plain script “walking billboard” tshirts as I call them. There are so many ways to monetize RUclips without selling your audience out to scammers.
Every fugging ad, every damn time, it's like the universe is whispering in my ear, "Reinstall Raid Shadow Legends, you piece of shit." I see those ads, and it's like my brain short-circuits, like I've got this itch in my skull that only those pixelated champions can scratch. It's not just a game; it's a compulsion, a fugging obsession. I've got to reinstall it, like I've got to breathe, like I've got to blink. The ads, they're everywhere, in my dreams, on the bus, on the fugging toilet paper ads. Each one is a siren call, pulling me back into that world where I can lose myself for hours, days, maybe forever. It's like, if I don't reinstall it immediately, my whole day is ruined, like I'm missing a limb or something. I reinstall it every time, even when I already have it, because if I don't, I might just melt into the floor, become one with the digital void where Raid Shadow Legends reigns supreme.
EVERTHING influencers promote is either a scam, part scam, grossly overpriced to allow for a "discount" or buying something you can basically get for free
@neverclevernorwitty7821 “…I’m oh so sad for all the regular people being duped by irresponsible influencers who were fronting a scam.” FTFY Influencers are not your friend.
@@neverclevernorwitty7821I'm not really open to feeling bad about this one. Anyone with sense could tell you it was a shady business model from the beginning, because if you can't easily tell how they make their profit, they have something to hide.
@@greenbees219no they should not, VPNs are redundant and untrustworthy, the only reason you should be using a VPN is to get around restrictions or torrent.
"getting paid for watching ads" is a "business model" that I remember from the days of dial-up internet. And even back then, I cannot remember that it ever really worked. One would dial in using a special phone number instead of the normal ISP one, and then be shown ads on top of the usual ads. This was supposed to enable free internet. Funny how the more things change, the more they stay the same.
I would see three versions of basically the same ad, just with the influencers saying different things at the beginning, or a funny meme playing, so much so that it got annoying. I saw at least six or seven ads about this that would play quite frequently.
They're probably not partnering with these platforms, they're likely just blocking the original ads and then replacing them with their own ads, so they get the entire revenue.
I don't think they are even "blocking" the ads. What might actually be happening, and why RUclips is allowing it (currently), at least outside of RUclips is the ads are "being served" but the extension prevents the ad from being seen (similar to how a PieHole works hmmmm), which means that there is a stronger context for "stealing from advertisers" (read "tortious interference") where they are paying for the ad to be "viewed", the ad is "served", but then Pie prevents it from being visible; this is not how other ad-blockers work where most will flat out prevent the ad from being recieved by the client computer therefore the packet send receives back a "failed" which means the ad was never "served".
@@gardian06_85 Not sure if I'm misunderstanding you or not but this sounds like that's better for creators than standard ad blockers then. I mean, if it flags as "served" then that means the advertisers think their ads are being watched, which adds to the prospective value of advertising on that platform, which ensures those platforms continue to get advertising deals, which in turn pays out to creators in ad revenue. So an adblocker that returns the ad as "served" is better for creators than one that doesn't.
@@duskmare0000 "better" for creators until the advertisers get wise. if you hired someone to mow your lawn, then a couple hour later they came up to your door saying they did the job, but only really doing the parts visible from the front door, then you say go to bed and the next day you walk outside to find your lawn was not fully mowed. This analogy also works with fixing that random knocking sound your car has, or the plumber fixing the leaky pipe. This is what "stating the ad has be served but hiding it before the user sees it" really does. We just find it ok, "because those annoying ad are wasting my free time" think about how many products or services you have interacted with purely because someone told you about it first; you might be surprised especially in the digital age where outside of people that live in forums or Reddit most things will come from advertising first.
RUclips needs to do better about screening advertisers.... They're worried about content creators when they should be worried about the SCAMS they're promoting themselves... I do NOT get paid to screen ads for RUclips, and yet they seem to rely on MY feedback before recognising medical misinformation, TOS violations, DANGEROUS commercials, and outright offensive advertisers...
The funniest part is that I've got an adblocker on 98% of the time. On rare occasions where I don't, bombarded with PIE ads. Yet YT has the nerve to tell me that *I'm the one* breaking TOS.
thing is. alot all of internet ads are scams because major companies like apple or coca cola already have a huge market share and customer base. they dont spend enough money on online ads to sustain a website like youtube. so ad companies need to allow scams just to keep the lights on.
Thank you for this video. When I saw my first pie ad, my first thought was that I'd never download an adblocker that advertizes. If an adblocker doesn't spread by word of mouth, I'm not intrested. Second thought was that there was no way they would pay users unless they were getting way more some way. I really hadn't considered the damage to creators, so, thank you for the background and details.
Exactly. I was immediately suspicious because they were immediately doing what they claim to prevent. Worse was how pervasive the ads have been. Mass ad campaigns are always suspicious
I personally use an adblock. Not because I am disgusted by the concept of creators I like getting ad revenue, but because I absolutely hate the atrocious and unregulated hellscape that is advertising where it seems like anyone can advertise anything to you and the only thing stopping them are some algorithms to curate what content you "might" like (in a sense that it is tangentially related to your internet usage history in the past two months). HOWEVER, PIE seems diabolical and always raised red flags in my mind as an adblocker that advertises themselves. Google has the option to self-regulate (even if it often doesn't) its ads, so the fact that they aren't stamping PIE to the ground with a steel-toed boot even though it, on the surface, stands against nearly everything their current business model stands for, probably means it doesn't quite do what it's advertised.
Worst thing about this is that google doesn't check their ad programs and what actually gets advertised. This is why you constantly see scams... i mean ads... i mean scams on youtube, that gets served as ads. And on google search it's even worse. So people don't just block ads with their blockers. They literally block scams.
I mostly agree but I don't really care that PIE advertises itself. You've got to build an initial customer base somehow for any new service. Silently releasing a product and just hoping people notice it and share it of their own accord is frankly naïve. Providers like Google and Meta are awful at screening their ads. I mean, those false Hero War ads have been all over facebook and youtube for years now and they literally use sexually provocative premises and outright fake gameplay to try to garner interest for some shitty mobile game. These companies just do not care what is being advertised on them. I frankly couldn't care less that an adblock service is using ads to spread awareness of your ability as a user to block ads. It's honestly pretty funny to me that they're using the awful advertising screening of these sites against them and advertising an anti-ad service in their ads. I'd always go for a straight and simple free adblocker rather than PIE. Any payment they give you for watching ads will never be worth it. Ad money is only worth a lot because of the quantity of users. Each user watching an ad is worth a fraction of a penny. So it'll never be worth it for an individual to be paid to watch ads. That's just a gimmick to sell the service over competing adblockers.
Really makes you wonder that the company that has vocally gone to war with adblockers (same company that wants to absolutely drown your viewing experience in as many ads as possible) would allow this particular adblocker, one that not only actively advertises itself but also advertises YOU getting paid for ads. That is a textbook failure of the smell test and anyone who thinks about it deeply for more than a second realizes that it's far too good to be true. Because it is.
@@joshuan.he didn’t bother sponsoring them because he wasn’t sure how in the world honey made money because the business model wasn’t known and didn’t make sense until now.
I guess I really shouldn't be suprised to see you here (the internet is a big place, but social media circles are small novadays) - but ngl, wasn't still expecting that. Hello, Sci-Fi! :) :D@@Sci-Fi_Freak_YT
Based on the Honey scam I imagine PIE would just say “Oh no we couldn’t block that ad for you - but don’t worry, earn double credit by watching it instead! ^_^
I legit got an ad for Pie on this video right before he showed the Pie ad and it took me a second to realize it wasn't part of the video 😆 Great video btw! I've been wondering why this company has been advertising so aggressively on RUclips.
Thanks for the link to the honey video. I saw it in my feed and didn't really care, but since you recommended it, I watched it anyway and - holy shit! That is some dirty behavior from PayPal. What a bunch of scammers (in my personal opinion)!
PayPal were always scammers. I've lost $3k with paypal on various transactions, some of them scams, and no, disputes don't work. They typically side with the scammer and you lose your money. So I stopped using paypal at all costs. Also their hatspeech rule is a bit much, considering they decide what hatespeech is , and then take the fine right out of your bank account. No thanks! I already hated that they had the ability to pull money out of my account whenever they wanted without my permission. Now they are using it with their hatspeech policy, and because I am not an extreme leftist I would be at risk for them misconstruing something I say as "hatespeech".
same, ive been using paypal my whole life too, cant believe they did that lol but i mean what is there not to believe, i think i was just being too oblivious.
Every single RUclips sponsorship is a scam. Every time a RUclipsr runs an ad I assume it's a scam. And so far 80% have proven to be the case. Raid shadow legends, crypto scams, Established titles, better help, honey. Just waiting on Nord.
It's infuriating that the early internet was great because you could cut out the middle men: You could order at small shops instead of wandering into Walmart, browse on small, independent blogs instead reading a newspaper subscription etc. And now it's middle men upon on middle men, with everything being closed off Facebooks, Amazons and RUclipss that companies like Pie or Honey hunt in.
"ad blocker" okay. "other ad blockers baaad!" never had any problems before. "get money for looking at ads" oh, there's the red flag. Now I'm wondering how they got money to advertise, no other ad blocker needed to advertise, it's a service that needs no advertising.
Any time I see free apps being advertised on youtube, I know not to use them. Free apps get their money from somewhere and its usually not great. Especially when it comes to mobile games. 9 times out of 10, its a glorified casino.
It's most likely that they pay you to watch their own ads, which an advertiser pays them to promote. You get a sliver of a cut and they get a cut. They make money, you get to think you're being paid money to watch ads. At least, until you do some basic math and realize that you're getting paid $0.002 for every hour you spend watching ads. Probably another service for the tech illiterate that see "get paid to watch ads" and are instantly convinced because "Well, we're already watching ads, why not get paid at least SOMETHING for it." while not realizing there are free adblockers out there.
@@duskmare0000 Like the $0.89 ‘Reward’ the customer “earned” in @MegaLag’s (excellent) video exposing Honey. (And the $35+ Honey stole from the creator, via their ACTUAL affiliate link…) 😡
@@Subaru_Natsuki It sounded like they give you the choice. You can either block ads or have ads and be paid for watching them. So I was only really expanding on how the 'being paid to watch ads' side would feasibly work.
In so many industries there are pointless "middle men" who are only there to trick you into paying more, or being deceived, on your way to a product/service. You should question ANY group that gets between you and a service or product. To be clear there are some cases that are hard to avoid, as an example supermarkets are "middle men" also, but you have no reasonable way to get groceries let alone at the massively discounted rates because of the bulk they are able to buy them at, this is because you can't get produce from the farmers or meats from the ranchers much of the time at all. Similar for many other products that you can't in the same way get products from a manufacturer. HOWEVER, there are many cases where "middle men" do nothing overall for the eco system besides taking money from you and usually refusing to give you the very product you are paying for.
Anyone remember the huge gpu scalper invasion during the pandemic (also PS5's)? Those people dared to declare themselves as middle men service providers that deserve their 100% to 500% cut from the upsell.
as middleman, at least honey got the customer the opportunity to get a coupon or collect points towards a reduction... infinite more than what the influencers would give you back on the product economically
@@xyzbesixdouzeand that justifies them taking the commission?.. that's the crux of the issue. in my opinion that's illegal if not unethical at the very least
Right now, "Pie" ads are the ones I see most often on RUclips. (Before they, cough, get interrupted.) Given that YT has been pitching an absolute fit about the sheer unmitigated gall of anyone using an app to prohibit their advertisements from running, the preponderance of ads for Pie makes YT's protestations a very bad joke. It's like a teatotaller's convention accepting ads for whiskey.
I’ve never actually seen a pie advertisement yet. But personally after the honey situation and reading the comments on the pinned post on the PayPal account. I’m never using them again. They’ve been stealing thousands. Either via PayPal themselves or their side companies. This is just the tip of the PayPal iceberg.
I first watched MegaLag's Honey expose and then stumbled onto this. Very well done. It is nice to know that people are on the case busting these scammers and bringing them to light. Keep up the outstanding work.
Literally the only thing I’ve ever decided to get from a RUclips sponsor was a VPN. And I’m on the fence about those data-deletion services too, but they don’t seem like a bad idea. Otherwise, naaaaahhhhh I’m good
god im so glad you're talking about this. ive spent MONTHS blocking pie ads. they made hundreds in different categories like "books and literature" or "video games"
@@23ButanedioneIf you want to change how the whole ad industry works you have to block ads. Not use an ad blocker. You have to tell Google what kind of ads you want. That way the people can get paid for their work.
I wish people would get it through their heads that nothing in life is free. If somebody is telling you to download/install something because "free stuff!", you're being scammed! Especially if the product is sponsoring RUclipsrs. Nobody has the money to sponsor people unless they have a scheme in mind. Truly free open source projects don't buy sponsor slots...
I know right? But I cant blame ppl who are kids and teenagers. I'm 32 years old I had my fare share of believing the "free stuff" shit it takes time to learn how our reality works. But if you are an adult who don't know that it's really a problem for you.
Nothing is free but sometimes things are free to use. For example, in Scotland there's an initiative to provide free condoms in order to improve sexual health of the populace and especially young people. They're paid for by the government so they're not 'free' but they are freely handed out to anyone from sexual health clinics. Things like PIE and RUclips are similar. Advertisers pay for adverts to be shown, which funds the services. The services are free for the user to use because the users are actually the products being provided to the advertisers. The services survive for as long as users are happy to use the service. The issue for these platforms is that users don't like seeing ads. So there's a constant struggle between showing more ads while keeping users compliant. RUclips has even seen this as a potential revenue source and offered "premium" as a way for users to essentially provide the money instead of the advertisers in order to avoid the ads entirely. PIE seems to be going a step further and giving users a small cut of the money gained from advertisers. Probably something like 10%, or less, for each advert they watch. This keeps them compliant and willing to watch more adverts, because they think they're gaining something from it, and therefore allows the service to show more ads to more people and make more money. Whenever you see a "Free" product, it's worth asking who your benefactor is and why they've made something free for you, and that should determine whether or not you use the service. With things like the free condoms, the benefactor is the government and the intent is to win votes though a show of altruism and effective action. With things like youtube and PIE, the benefactor is advertisers and their intent is to shotgun their products into as many people's faces as possible so that people will buy their products and make them a lot more money back than the amount they spent on advertising.
nothing about pie or honey is open source. it is proprietary spyware. there is only one adblocker worth downloading and I think everyone already knows which one that is
Here's another problem this creates: Over the last 5 years, I'm seen my favorite channels get sponsored by what turns out to be shady/terrible companies, causing me to literally skip over the content creator's ad reads. I even did it on this video. I don't trust the fact that I hear a Ground News ad read on almost every other channel I watch. I bet in 1-2 years, I'll hear dirt on them too. Sorry. I'm going to continue to use Brave browser to block YT ads, and I'm going to continue to skip over channel ad reads. If you don't want your content published and visible for free, I totally get it. Put it behind a subscriber paywall. Until then, I will continue to watch what I can for free, and when the free web dies, I will not be subscribing to anything. I already "pay" with unfettered access to my personal data.
Exactly. I will do anything to not see ads online and when that eventually means that the free web will die then so be it. It was fun while it lasted. They shouldn't have startet their services on the sole principle of it beeing free in the first place.
I think Ground News is legit, as it inherently has to provide links to its sources you would quickly realise if it wasn't. There are also bias checking websites which seem to concur that its neutral. Although I do get annoyed by the "created by an ex-NASA engineer", like that has any relevance to if the site is factual or legitimate?
@@alexatkin Afaik, the current biggest problem with Ground News is that their left, center, and right bias labels are based on the USA. So several things may be listed as center that would be listed as right leaning in, say, England. Hopefully that's the worst of it, but I haven't taken more than 30 minutes to check it myself. (And ditto on how weird it is that they mention NASA engineer, maybe they're trying to bring Mark Roper feelings to it? I can't think of any other reason to mention NASA engineer, but again. Only 30 minutes of checking myself)
5:22 "a trusted LA-based company" That's your problem right there, partner, ain't nothing trustworthy about LA in all seriousness, if none of the things in this ad ring any alarm bells, I don't have much hope for you
The wildest thing about Honey was that Linus Tech Tips knew what was happening and DIDN'T TELL ANYONE. By the looks of it, PIE does the same thing as Honey. They pose as the advertiser/affiliate to get the money.
@@ivanpetrov5255 I lost respect for Linus. He knew that ppl like him content creators being scammed and he was like I don't care as long as I won't get scammed everything is fine.
@Zydraxis From megalad's video, I understood LTT switched to a different extension - Karma. It's practically the same as Honey, down to the scamming. 😑
"Guys, why you so worried about the ads on RUclips? Chill just get PIE" I've seen that ad almost on every video I've watched for the last month.. I went to the site, and immediately clicked off of it.. Just didn't feel right. Saw Markipliers vid on honey and thought, now someone need's to talk about PIE, then yours showed up lol. Thanks for talking about this one as well!
Thank you so much for this video! I haven't watched your video yet (I'm literally writing this 16 minutes after you released a 17 minute video), but I knew something was probably off about pie. No amount of blocks or dislikes or settings changes could keep this ad from showing up.
@@vaikjsf34a I don't use one at all on youtube. Not for any moral reasons, I just don't feel like it. I was referring to the youtube/google ad settings not letting me prevent it.
This 100%! Thinking of any 3rd party plugin as "open window" to your house. That over time opens more and more. Don't use any extentions, use Brave and keep it updated.
Absolutely. The fewer plugins you have, the better. And if you no longer need a plugin, go in and disable it. Things that used to be trustworthy have been purchased and turned into spyware before and will be again.
These scams always target RUclipsrs for advertising since most RUclipsrs are self-employed and often naïve enough to blindly take the deal without doing their research.
I doubt people like mrbeast, ltt, mkhd are naive - they are deliberate in promoting this trash, they simply don’t care because they got truckload of cash. Staggeringly entitled rich people
THANK YOU! I knew something was up with the pie ads even saw some reddit posts asking about it and now i see a video about pie that I’ve been begging to see.
The entirety of advertising is anti-consumer. I don’t just use Adblock, I also use sponsor block. I don’t want to hear about shitty product or shave my balls, I want to watch content/information. Anything that gets in the way of that is like an irritating bug you swat away by any means necessary.
Marketing ruins everything. The key is to train oneself to ignore the advertising. Finding and learning the tools to fight is to stay vigilant. Most people are lazy and likes being sold to.
@@AlenAbdula I dont agree that people like being sold to but folks are lazy and ignorant. without critical mass or revolution of philosophy nothing will change.
advertisement is fuel for inflation, creates degenerate antisocial cloudchasing and tries to addict and brainrot our children like cocomelon/tiktok... one would think that this parasitic overhad would be pushed out of the free capitalism market, but it's ideal for whitwashing and syphoning profits out of the business to avoid taxes that pay for the bricks and bones in society. ofc the repeating history of politics have made people sceptic about true nature of that last one
UE has been early on so many things before they happen its sad at times not seeing you getting some credit but at least i know of a consistently reliable source of info
He's early bc he rips video ideas and puts no effort into it, right down to the thumbnail. Its a 17 minute video of pure speculation with no hard evidence or research, half the video is him talking about MegaLags video.
wth do you mean by 'no evidence'? He showed you the evidence linking the PIE and Honey company, if you actually watched the video, you would see that he shows you the LinkedIn page for both of them and made the connection between the founders of the companies. That's hard enough evidence to show that they're operating similarly if you ask me. Besides, he also showed you that PIE has the exact same coupon "service" that Honey does. Please for the love of god, watch the content you're talking about before complaining, this is embarrassing, dude.
I don't think I have _ever_ bought something due to a YT (or similar) ad, but I _do_ blacklist companies for making bad ones. Second time I saw a PIE ad, they got added to that list.
@yellingintothewind Only ad I ever liked on this site was one that was just, a music video. The whole thing. I got it multiple times and listened to it cuz I genuinely liked it. Idc about the normal ads, if I'm on RUclips it's either for entertainment, or information, often both at the same time, idgaf about some artificial plant garden or Mafia City.
@@asupremetab Agreed. Sponsored content in a tiny handful of cases is actually useful to me, but that's about it. I have bought a fair number of tools at James Hamilton's (@StumpyNubs) recommendation, and never been disappointed in the results.
Okay, I think this might be the first time I've seen your videos, but I immediately want to say I very much appreciate how much focus you put on the other sources and creators who are digging into the same topics you do, or who raise them to your attention, by name. Detailed citations may be basic practice in some fields, but they're also uncommon at times, and the focus you put into them in this context specifically stands out. Kudos.
RAID SHADOW LEGENDS. WE ARE PROUD TO SHOW HOW SHITTY WE ARE HONEY WE ARE SHITTY BUT WE WILL ACT LIKE WE ARE TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE I can't believe I am seeing Raid in a good light.
Middleman adblocker. Is that akin to what AdAware tried to do? Going to advertisers and say "hey, pay us to 'verify' your add isn't messing up the user experience... and we'll let it trough." That basically ended them. Also, I think Pi-hole has a decent case for trademark infringement. Same name, same niche. Probably intentional.
@@TheyCallMeIce I don't think Pi-Hole could even get a trademark if they wanted to just from the sole fact that their name comes from the Raspberry Pi, a separate product the software was designed to run on.
No, it's called "pi-hole" not "pie". While it is in the same space "ad blocking" they are clearly separate names. Of course any lawyer will tell both sides they could win, because they'd want the money. There is enough differentiation between them, and pi-hole does not own the word "pie". "pie" itself is not copyrightable, and probably can't even trademark it, as it is a common dictionary word used by literally everyone on planet earth. I hardly doubt a suit like that would be successful. "pi-hole" can be trademarked, but they called themselves "pie" not "pi-hole".
Honestly money being made through ads in the first place is the issue. Fraud is supposed to be illegal, but I've never seen an ad that doesn't just blatantly lie about the product. The entirety of our entertainment industry being funded by fraud would inevitably lead to horrible outcomes
Most ads are not complete lies. If it was a complete lie then that would open the doors for a lawsuit. That being said, over-the-top exaggerations do not open the door for lawsuits under the idea that it's obviously an exaggeration. The idea of ads is to sell a product or build trust in a brand, that doesn't happen if the ad is completely untruthful. While I do wish that more ads were upfront with what their product actually is and how it actually works, I understand why they aren't, It's hard to make an ad that is very transparent while also still being entertaining, it's not impossible, just hard.
For me it's gotten to the point where pretty much anything advertised on RUclips immediately gets added to my personal boycott list. After seeing the same add, for the same product, 20+ times a day... I'm just done. Honestly i though ad-algorithms were more intelligent than that. There has to be a point where showing the same customer the same add for the 573rd time, just doesn't move the needle anymore! I appreciate the reporting on this... I was initially avoiding it under the 'too good to be true' angle, before they crossed my 'BS threshold' by bombarding me with 400 adds.
YEah partly this is because YT is scamming their advertisers out of some more impressions. Yeah we served 1,000,000,000 of your ads, but only to 1,000 people 🤣
The algorithm isn’t there to promote the right products to the right people. It’s there to convince advertisers that’s what it does while irritating viewers to the point they’ll snap and buy a RUclips premium membership to get rid of the maddening ads. That and their AI is absolutely borked (but that, too, serves them)
Maybe as more folks talk about this subject of an aggressive, ethically questionable middleman company, we'll talk about far larger behemoths operating in a similar vein: health insurance companies.
We hate ads. We hate advertisers, marketing, commercials and plethora of other ways to waste my time. Which is obviously way more valuable than your time. We do not want to "get paid" for watching ads....we want ads to go away, disappear. Period. Thanks to PIE, we will continue viewing RUclips videos until it doesn't work anymore. Which is what happened to "ublock origin" ad blocker, which worked for 2 years until recently.
Have you ever asked how the creators who make the content you want to watch ad free should be paid for their efforts? I hope you pay for youtube premium so that they get something.
The answer is they shouldn't be paid at all. At least not as much as they do now. Going back to 2014 and previous levels would suffice, and honestly solve so many problems with modern RUclips.
@@PurplePotato-gr5jk gee, for more than one day a week of work, as a small creator, (on a different channel) I get paid $3 per day. You think I shouldn't get anything, just provide it out of the goodness of my heart. Do you also own slaves?
I already dislike Ground News because I don't think the two sides of the political spectrum have equally valid opinions that should be given equal weight. I want my news to be politically biased. Thanks.
Block ads? But then how will I know to füm while I use nord vpn to order hello fresh and buy manscaped products to use on my tiny square of land in Scotland?? 😂
My experience was even worse, not only did it not find me codes, it replaced the ones I already had with either nothing or lower than I already had. Like you said instant uninstall
There are pretty strong evidence they even copied the adblock part of their app from ublock origin, thus violating the gpl license (because their extension should be open source, to don't violate it)
I installed PIE once out of curiosity and IMMEDIATLEY uninstalled it because when I did, my browser detected a random file being installed to my computer with a complicated string of characters. I could just be confused but this extension seems very shady in what it actually does, I wouldn't trust it at all.
@@NvidiaRTX5080there is a difference between extensions and random files being downloaded onto your hard drive. Normal browser extensions don’t do that when you download them onto the browser.
@@NvidiaRTX5080 in the browsers install folder. That is normal. That is all handled by the browser and is essentially invisible to the user. The abnormal part is the extension trying to install files literally anywhere else because then it’s outside of the browsers system and the control of the browser. If you spot that happening when you install an extension, that is either a program looking to collect extra advertising data, or (and more likely in most scenarios) it is some kind of system virus.
11:57 All those fake survey websites has trained my brain to automatically assume the app or website is a scam whenever they have fake loading bars like these that are designed to pretend like they're doing work when they aren't.
If Google was against adblocking, why would they push out so much Pie advertising? That was what alerted me. It's as if Pie Adblock was working with Google!
1:15 "I can't blame RUclipsrs for overlooking Red Flags" Well i can blame them, look at all the Massive channels promoting Honey and Pie, these channels have been on YT a long time, have millions or many millions of Subs and have whole teams of employees, they know what they're doing when they take the money.
You think RUclipsrs "knew what they were doing" when they actively advertised a service that poached money from them? Pretty sure if RUclipsrs knew about the affiliate hijacking none of them would want to work with Honey.
markiplier literally went out of his way to say that he wasn’t gonna promote honey bc it make him sus. it’s so easy. when these mfs promote things like better help i get so disgusted and have to leave a comment shaming them. it always gets backlash, but i don’t even care anymore. it’s known fact and it’s preying on vulnerable people
As soon as I heard, "get Paid to see ads" Immedient thought it was sus, I even looked to see on reddit if anyone else was skeptical, Ive never installed pie, just doesn't feel right, to get adblocker ads in youtubes AdBlock war
I find it very normal to be paid to watch ads. I find it gross how the whole internet thinks they're entitled to my time, bandwidth for their shitty ads, a few sure, but we're way past that.
the "How To Do CPR On Your Grandma" ad that youve likely seen everywhere has a clip of an old lady falling down escalators with a shopping cart. that old lady died from that. im all for shock humor and the like but using that to sell a product is so astronomically messed up its insane
Just realized RUclips's "Report" button does not include "Promotes product violating RUclips's TOS" option, but it definitely should. Won't solve the issue automatically, of course, but would help the audience be more specific in their feedback. Also, regarding "pretty much all of your favorite RUclipsrs" - funnily enough this video is the first time I hear of Honey. Makes me wonder: 1. how large the audience intersection of UpperEchelon and these people actually is. 2. whether my very frequent use of "never recommend channel" helped me get rid of more trash in my life than I realize.
It's no coincidence that RUclips put the hammer down on adblockers _right before_ we started seeing an insane saturation of preroll ads for pie all over the place.
Thank you for this, I had a bad feeling from day one when these Pie ads started appearing that there's no way this can be good for creators OR viewers.
Cruel as it might sound, I don't have a ton of sympathy for RUclips influencers in this case. They've been peddling bad products and services (Manscaped, Raycon, Nord VPN, Raid: Casino Legends) for years, but now it's a problem when they're the ones getting the shit end of the stick? Yeah, no. Honey may be con artists to the highest degree, but I'm not gonna pretend like this isn't some sweet karmic justice.
Still they also deceive customers because they claim to give you the best discount coupons which isn't the case. I think Edge browser also has a coupon thing installed standard. So why use Honey anyways?
In defense of the RUclipsrs, They are not experts at whatever it is they advertise, and it can be really hard to spot scams and shady products. At the end of the day, the RUclipsr is doing the advertisement because the need the money
@@33pandagamer In the case of Honey that might be true. But when it comes to products like Manscaped, Raycon, Established Titles, eetc. There's enough evidence to be found through a quick Google search as to why they're shady. Not being an expert isn't an excuse to not do your research into what you're peddling.
Clearing browser cookies usually helps with buffering issues. If YT blocks you from watching videos because they finally caught the adblock, just clear your entire cache and it'll reset. Brave is very good.
@@thewhitefalcon8539 brave is way better. It's a lower level ad blocker, so it will always work better than ublock or any other extension purely on that premise.
@@wahtari03765 Yes, they recently had added modals nagging you that adblockers were bad and you a bad person for using them (lmao). Took Brave a couple of hours to fix it. Granted, other extensions too. But why deal with extensions when it comes built in. _Someone_ is gonna sell my data; might as well be the inventor of JavaScript. 🤷♂
I'm so glad you covered this! I've just started seeing ads for pie in the last week, and I wanted to research it, but hadn't had the time yet. I had NOT seen the ads that said if you chose to watch ads, you'd get paid. They may have stopped showing that add, because while the ads I saw were "red flag" enough for me to want to research it first, if I had seen that in ANY ad by them, that would have 100% set off my BS meter. What they had already said was enough for me to say "smells like bull, but I should look into it." I will definitely look into the video you linked. And somehow I missed Honey was a scam, but again, my BS detector was right about it, even though I didn't do the research on it. It fell into the category "too good to be true", which is right like 99% of the time. Boy, I'm REALLY grateful I have a good BS detector! Thanks again, UE. Much appreciated!
I'm so glad someone did a video on this. I literally thought of the specific video (of the insane number I've been forced to watch) referencing that "Pie" was founded by one of the creators of "Honey" when watching the "MegaLag" video. I immediately went through the comments to see if anyone had brought that up but if so I missed it. Hopefully more people find this because these scummy (downright illegal) ethically bankrupt practices, need to be exposed!
Honestly i was very suspicious of pie immediately because for me i was like "then do the creators i want to watch not get money anymore? That seems shitty." And now that the honey situation makes it obvious these guys mo is literally to be a parasite, stealing nutrients (money) from others, the pie thing feels way less shocking. Hopefully the situation blowing up makes people wary to try pie so less damage is done.
Also it just makes youtube look bad. Like you're telling me they're allowing a ton of ads to run... That say they'll take away RUclips ads? On RUclips? Surely RUclips has to run some checks on their ads. Or is money the only gatekeeper? It's insane
@@SunshineCo225 RIGHT? I'm not sure why RUclips are still allowing Pie's ads to run. It's been at least three months since I started seeing the company name.
@@SunshineCo225 true, my conspiracy theory is that since Pie's business model revolves around users choosing to be exposed to advertisements that are partnered with Pie, RUclips might have plans on partnering with them so they are the only regulated ad blocker on the site.
The main red flag for me is that is it’s a “free” app that pays you money. That’s already pretty suspicious, but the constant sponsors make me raise an eyebrow. How does a free app not only pay its users money but give thousands of dollars to sponsor creators? The math ain’t mathin.
ublock and firefox is the best, I find it so funny that chrome users are so addicted to google services that they don't even care about having to see ads anymore
I remember seeing some pie ads over on TikTok and then I started seeing them on RUclips shorts, I knew from the first one I saw that it was probably a scam. And I’m glad I wasn’t tricked by this one.
Absolutely love how at the bottom of Pie's website it proudly proclaimed, "Made in Los Angeles by the founding team that built Honey," and now it just says, "Proudly built in Los Angeles". Looks like someone figured out that associating yourself with Honey is a no go.
Absolutely fascinating that these scams along with straight up "adult" AI ads are allowed, but using certain words to express myself with earns me a 1/2 day ban...
Go to ground.news/echelon to see all sides of every story. Subscribe through my link to get 50% off unlimited access this month only.
Tried to race rhe bots but my comment didn't post
But I like pie. More during Thanksgiving than Christmas 🎉
That thumbnail rip
ground news is stolen content, talking about middlemen
Upper Echelon: After reading some of your comments regarding the thumbnail (being blah blah blah)... you have a wonderful command of the English language! Keep it up, this is how I deal with dipshittards in real life... 🙂 (PS: Merry Xmas!)
If an adblock is running ads, extreme red flag. You've never seen a ublock origin ad or the like, they spread by word of mouth. Unwritten rule
Use brave no1 .
From what I am reading, this scheme is similar to Brave's BAT reward scheme where you'd get crypto tokens for being served anonimized ads. It did not take off.
Annoying Pie ads showing up so often everywhere advertising about blocking annoying ads was just peak ironic.
Its a shame Chrome is disabling ublock origins
@@tonykivancNo, it's not because you shouldn't be using chrome.
The first major red flag to me was the fact that they were *aggressively* advertising their service
Like...every other ad I got over the past couple of months has been Pie ads
Why would a service that was made by someone who claims to "hate ads so much he dedicated his life to stopping them" push out ads so aggressively? And why would they offer to pay you to see ads if one of its creators claims to hate ads?
fr
The real question is where are they getting the money. They’re stealing the Google ad sense 😂
I haven’t seen any pie ad or ads
Don't forget the pitch of "you can get paid to watch them". If you hated ads so much, why would you simply provide a way to feed even more into the system of ads? Do you hate ads or do you want to encourage people to watch more? Make up your mind.
@@toolazytobeoriginal4587 It's an actual business. Some people will "watch" ads (turn it on and let it run) in exchange for points to redeem for gift cards or money on survey sites. There's a subreddit called beermoney about those things because it's extra money for hobbies. The Brave browser had/has, unsure the status, a similar thing where you could enable ads for some of their crypto in exchange. Some people will do it for the pocket change or because they're so used to zoning out ads that it's pure benefit.
> create fraudulent service
> sell fraudulent service
> create fraudulent service with extra features
> repeat?
Corporate money glitch
U forgot one step
>sell the company
Then repeat
They aren't extra features, just the same ones wrapped up in the latest buzzword on wall street
Be a RUclipsr
Advertise a scam
Clutch your pearls
Blame the company
At this point it’s a known fact that sponsors are mostly scams. RUclipsrs will try to argue that they can’t keep making content if they don’t have sponsors but do nothing to vet sponsors. That’s like a crack dealer crying he can’t feed his family if he doesn’t keep selling crack. At what point do we realize that these RUclipsrs are the ones scamming. They know full well what they are advertising OR possibly even worse they have no idea what it is and have no problem getting paid to advertise it anyway.
@@mariocruz414😂😂😂
2:31 Small detail since Megalag's video was published. That footer that says "Made in Los Angeles by the founding team that built Honey", has now been changed to "Proudly build in Los Angeles".
wowwwwww
jfc lmfao
They changed the wording on their about page, swapping "previously created honey" with "originally created honey". They're clearly aware of the fallout and try to wiggle their way out in a Homer Simpson disappearing in a bush kind of way.
I’m surprised honey hasn’t received like 100k law suits
What’s even more unbelievable than them trying to cover up that they made honey is the idea that anybody would be proud to be from Los Angeles… 🤔
What's incredible about PIE is that the "% space saved" shows that it doesn't work as an ad blocker. How does it know the memory saved? Because it let the ad load before removing it. That's not how an ad blocker is supposed to work. It's supposed to catch the network request that would load the ad and cancel it.
is "% space saved" it talking about memory or screen space on the webpage?
@@shlep444 What their saying is, the ad gets blocked before it even accesses your memory. It's knocking at the door of your router and the ad blocker is telling the knocker to go away without opening the door where the memory is at. So you can't "calculate" how much space that ad would have taken up in memory because it was never let in the door to be measured.
Probably just a made up number
It must be letting the App think that the ad actually played then?
I haven't looked at it specifically in ages, but I do recall websites breaking if you didn't fully load the ad at the very least, thus requiring to load it first and then skipping it
I remember seeing an ad from Mr. Beast telling kids to go to every computer of their family in their home to install Honey. Talk about invasive and predatory.
That is so in character for Jimmy
They wer scamming the Creators and Not the Costumer lol.
Calling MrBeast out even If EVERY other RUclipsr Like Charly (Pinguinzo) wer also taking the same Sponsor is Just Not fair.
Creators scamming the Fans for Years.
-RAID SHADOW LEGENDS!
-Displate
-Raycon
And so many more.
90% of Sponsors are Scammers
Yea. The problem is that no one knew that honey is a scam. But same telling kids to go to every computer they know to install something is predatory and ugly
In his defense no one knew till now.
Oh wow, I have a feeling they told him to say that in the ad script because it’s so specific to what they needed to maximise the affiliate money they could poach. That request is not something people say unless they know they need it on as many computers as possible, otherwise it’s just a weird thing to tell people. They probably had it in the script disguised as a bad joke
I'm instantly suspicious of any product promoted by a RUclipsr
@@TheJolle same even if it's a RUclipsrs I trust. I prefer all RUclipsrs promote raid shadow legends instead of those scammers shit
When I launch my channel I’m not going to do ad reads, I’m just going to sell merch, only my merch isn’t going to be mass produced garbage. I’ve been working on a trading card game for a couple years, that’ll probably be among the first things I sell. And I already print my own t-shirt designs so my t-shirts won’t be plain script “walking billboard” tshirts as I call them. There are so many ways to monetize RUclips without selling your audience out to scammers.
Or Google. Won't use/buy.
Every fugging ad, every damn time, it's like the universe is whispering in my ear, "Reinstall Raid Shadow Legends, you piece of shit." I see those ads, and it's like my brain short-circuits, like I've got this itch in my skull that only those pixelated champions can scratch. It's not just a game; it's a compulsion, a fugging obsession. I've got to reinstall it, like I've got to breathe, like I've got to blink. The ads, they're everywhere, in my dreams, on the bus, on the fugging toilet paper ads. Each one is a siren call, pulling me back into that world where I can lose myself for hours, days, maybe forever. It's like, if I don't reinstall it immediately, my whole day is ruined, like I'm missing a limb or something. I reinstall it every time, even when I already have it, because if I don't, I might just melt into the floor, become one with the digital void where Raid Shadow Legends reigns supreme.
Good.
EVERTHING influencers promote is either a scam, part scam, grossly overpriced to allow for a "discount" or buying something you can basically get for free
Coffeezilla just did a video about online gambling and it was 3 out of 4 creators that were taking money. You have to assume all of them are.
Exactly, I'm oh so sad for those influencers getting duped.
@neverclevernorwitty7821 “…I’m oh so sad for all the regular people being duped by irresponsible influencers who were fronting a scam.” FTFY
Influencers are not your friend.
@@neverclevernorwitty7821I'm not really open to feeling bad about this one. Anyone with sense could tell you it was a shady business model from the beginning, because if you can't easily tell how they make their profit, they have something to hide.
@@greenbees219no they should not, VPNs are redundant and untrustworthy, the only reason you should be using a VPN is to get around restrictions or torrent.
"People's Internet Experiment" is downright dystopian sounding.
"Profiteering Is Evil" would be closer to the truth.
im thinking communist but most "utopia" promoting idealogies end up the same.
It's double-plus-dystopian.
People's Republic of
And coming from commiefornia no less
"getting paid for watching ads" is a "business model" that I remember from the days of dial-up internet. And even back then, I cannot remember that it ever really worked.
One would dial in using a special phone number instead of the normal ISP one, and then be shown ads on top of the usual ads. This was supposed to enable free internet.
Funny how the more things change, the more they stay the same.
Memory unlocked
If I EVER hear an ad say that, I’ll immediately assume it’s a scam
I remember you could get "money" by clicking ad links. Lol. It was like 10 cents per hundred or something measly
Knew something was fishy when I got nothing but ads for an adblocker
I would see three versions of basically the same ad, just with the influencers saying different things at the beginning, or a funny meme playing, so much so that it got annoying. I saw at least six or seven ads about this that would play quite frequently.
Just chill
@@spencers4121Oh, WONDERFUL advice! Why didn’t I think of that?
It blocks ad's though and that's all I'm using it for
its just copying brave rewards. nothing new really
They're probably not partnering with these platforms, they're likely just blocking the original ads and then replacing them with their own ads, so they get the entire revenue.
why does that feel worse
@@JNJNRobin1337 Because that's what (some kinds of) malware does
I don't think they are even "blocking" the ads. What might actually be happening, and why RUclips is allowing it (currently), at least outside of RUclips is the ads are "being served" but the extension prevents the ad from being seen (similar to how a PieHole works hmmmm), which means that there is a stronger context for "stealing from advertisers" (read "tortious interference") where they are paying for the ad to be "viewed", the ad is "served", but then Pie prevents it from being visible; this is not how other ad-blockers work where most will flat out prevent the ad from being recieved by the client computer therefore the packet send receives back a "failed" which means the ad was never "served".
@@gardian06_85 Not sure if I'm misunderstanding you or not but this sounds like that's better for creators than standard ad blockers then. I mean, if it flags as "served" then that means the advertisers think their ads are being watched, which adds to the prospective value of advertising on that platform, which ensures those platforms continue to get advertising deals, which in turn pays out to creators in ad revenue. So an adblocker that returns the ad as "served" is better for creators than one that doesn't.
@@duskmare0000 "better" for creators until the advertisers get wise. if you hired someone to mow your lawn, then a couple hour later they came up to your door saying they did the job, but only really doing the parts visible from the front door, then you say go to bed and the next day you walk outside to find your lawn was not fully mowed.
This analogy also works with fixing that random knocking sound your car has, or the plumber fixing the leaky pipe.
This is what "stating the ad has be served but hiding it before the user sees it" really does. We just find it ok, "because those annoying ad are wasting my free time" think about how many products or services you have interacted with purely because someone told you about it first; you might be surprised especially in the digital age where outside of people that live in forums or Reddit most things will come from advertising first.
RUclips needs to do better about screening advertisers.... They're worried about content creators when they should be worried about the SCAMS they're promoting themselves...
I do NOT get paid to screen ads for RUclips, and yet they seem to rely on MY feedback before recognising medical misinformation, TOS violations, DANGEROUS commercials, and outright offensive advertisers...
The funniest part is that I've got an adblocker on 98% of the time. On rare occasions where I don't, bombarded with PIE ads. Yet YT has the nerve to tell me that *I'm the one* breaking TOS.
youtube needs to layoff the censorship its making them look like they are pedo sympathizers.
thing is. alot all of internet ads are scams because major companies like apple or coca cola already have a huge market share and customer base. they dont spend enough money on online ads to sustain a website like youtube. so ad companies need to allow scams just to keep the lights on.
even more so how many RUclipsrs have promoted scams without getting punished for it.
That moment, when content creator has to censor swear words, while the ads promote hentai porn gatcha gambling.🤣
You perform a great service for the internet, whether its bringing light to an unnoticed problem or a deeper explanation of some ongoing controversy.
Thank you for this video. When I saw my first pie ad, my first thought was that I'd never download an adblocker that advertizes. If an adblocker doesn't spread by word of mouth, I'm not intrested.
Second thought was that there was no way they would pay users unless they were getting way more some way.
I really hadn't considered the damage to creators, so, thank you for the background and details.
Exactly. I was immediately suspicious because they were immediately doing what they claim to prevent. Worse was how pervasive the ads have been. Mass ad campaigns are always suspicious
I personally use an adblock. Not because I am disgusted by the concept of creators I like getting ad revenue, but because I absolutely hate the atrocious and unregulated hellscape that is advertising where it seems like anyone can advertise anything to you and the only thing stopping them are some algorithms to curate what content you "might" like (in a sense that it is tangentially related to your internet usage history in the past two months).
HOWEVER, PIE seems diabolical and always raised red flags in my mind as an adblocker that advertises themselves. Google has the option to self-regulate (even if it often doesn't) its ads,
so the fact that they aren't stamping PIE to the ground with a steel-toed boot even though it, on the surface, stands against nearly everything their current business model stands for, probably means it doesn't quite do what it's advertised.
Worst thing about this is that google doesn't check their ad programs and what actually gets advertised. This is why you constantly see scams... i mean ads... i mean scams on youtube, that gets served as ads. And on google search it's even worse. So people don't just block ads with their blockers. They literally block scams.
youtubers aren't entitled to your money so don't feel bad
I mostly agree but I don't really care that PIE advertises itself. You've got to build an initial customer base somehow for any new service. Silently releasing a product and just hoping people notice it and share it of their own accord is frankly naïve. Providers like Google and Meta are awful at screening their ads. I mean, those false Hero War ads have been all over facebook and youtube for years now and they literally use sexually provocative premises and outright fake gameplay to try to garner interest for some shitty mobile game.
These companies just do not care what is being advertised on them.
I frankly couldn't care less that an adblock service is using ads to spread awareness of your ability as a user to block ads. It's honestly pretty funny to me that they're using the awful advertising screening of these sites against them and advertising an anti-ad service in their ads.
I'd always go for a straight and simple free adblocker rather than PIE. Any payment they give you for watching ads will never be worth it. Ad money is only worth a lot because of the quantity of users. Each user watching an ad is worth a fraction of a penny. So it'll never be worth it for an individual to be paid to watch ads. That's just a gimmick to sell the service over competing adblockers.
Really makes you wonder that the company that has vocally gone to war with adblockers (same company that wants to absolutely drown your viewing experience in as many ads as possible) would allow this particular adblocker, one that not only actively advertises itself but also advertises YOU getting paid for ads. That is a textbook failure of the smell test and anyone who thinks about it deeply for more than a second realizes that it's far too good to be true. Because it is.
@Walumancer walumancwr
The fact that Markiplier was on point with Honey way before is actually fucking funny
What did Markiplier say?
@@joshuan.he didn’t bother sponsoring them because he wasn’t sure how in the world honey made money because the business model wasn’t known and didn’t make sense until now.
Markiplier is the goat
I guess I really shouldn't be suprised to see you here (the internet is a big place, but social media circles are small novadays) - but ngl, wasn't still expecting that. Hello, Sci-Fi! :) :D@@Sci-Fi_Freak_YT
@@John7Wirth lol hey there old friend 🎩
Based on the Honey scam I imagine PIE would just say “Oh no we couldn’t block that ad for you - but don’t worry, earn double credit by watching it instead! ^_^
I legit got an ad for Pie on this video right before he showed the Pie ad and it took me a second to realize it wasn't part of the video 😆
Great video btw! I've been wondering why this company has been advertising so aggressively on RUclips.
Thanks for the link to the honey video. I saw it in my feed and didn't really care, but since you recommended it, I watched it anyway and - holy shit! That is some dirty behavior from PayPal. What a bunch of scammers (in my personal opinion)!
PayPal were always scammers. I've lost $3k with paypal on various transactions, some of them scams, and no, disputes don't work. They typically side with the scammer and you lose your money. So I stopped using paypal at all costs. Also their hatspeech rule is a bit much, considering they decide what hatespeech is , and then take the fine right out of your bank account. No thanks! I already hated that they had the ability to pull money out of my account whenever they wanted without my permission. Now they are using it with their hatspeech policy, and because I am not an extreme leftist I would be at risk for them misconstruing something I say as "hatespeech".
same, ive been using paypal my whole life too, cant believe they did that lol but i mean what is there not to believe, i think i was just being too oblivious.
Pairing "trusted" with "LA based" gave me a good laugh.
Lol seriously. I can't believe they went with that 😂
Hollyweird-Os + The city of devils
I was about to say this, lmao. It's an oxymoron at this point
Haha. I caught that one too and thought the same thing.
"place bad. glad i live in other place"
Every single RUclips sponsorship is a scam.
Every time a RUclipsr runs an ad I assume it's a scam. And so far 80% have proven to be the case. Raid shadow legends, crypto scams, Established titles, better help, honey.
Just waiting on Nord.
I’m waiting on Squarespace
NordVPN had a massive data breach a few years back and never told their users about it.
They also oversell the benefits of their service a bit. The best VPN provider doesn't even allow affiliate marketing and doesn't advertise AFAIK.
stopped watching after he put a sponsor in this video, this one video explaining the ad scams he had to make money off LMAO
ALL VPN’s are a waste of time and money.
No company is giving you money for free. I'm personally sceptical to everything that claims to pay you for simple stuff like this
Think about it. They are building a profile on all their users and their spending habits. Everything.
@@rsmetz88 exactly. If something is claiming to be free, you're paying with your data.
Always ask yourself when you see/hear "free" this question :"what do they get from doing this free for us?"
😂
The idea is they siphon some of the money that's being made off you in the background and give it back to you
There's no such thing as a free lunch. Everybody wants something in return for something.
As Markiplier would put it.
"WHERE ARE THEY GETTING THE MONEY??????"
It's infuriating that the early internet was great because you could cut out the middle men: You could order at small shops instead of wandering into Walmart, browse on small, independent blogs instead reading a newspaper subscription etc. And now it's middle men upon on middle men, with everything being closed off Facebooks, Amazons and RUclipss that companies like Pie or Honey hunt in.
"ad blocker" okay.
"other ad blockers baaad!" never had any problems before.
"get money for looking at ads" oh, there's the red flag.
Now I'm wondering how they got money to advertise, no other ad blocker needed to advertise, it's a service that needs no advertising.
Any time I see free apps being advertised on youtube, I know not to use them. Free apps get their money from somewhere and its usually not great. Especially when it comes to mobile games. 9 times out of 10, its a glorified casino.
It's most likely that they pay you to watch their own ads, which an advertiser pays them to promote. You get a sliver of a cut and they get a cut. They make money, you get to think you're being paid money to watch ads. At least, until you do some basic math and realize that you're getting paid $0.002 for every hour you spend watching ads. Probably another service for the tech illiterate that see "get paid to watch ads" and are instantly convinced because "Well, we're already watching ads, why not get paid at least SOMETHING for it." while not realizing there are free adblockers out there.
@@duskmare0000 Like the $0.89 ‘Reward’ the customer “earned” in @MegaLag’s (excellent) video exposing Honey. (And the $35+ Honey stole from the creator, via their ACTUAL affiliate link…) 😡
@@duskmare0000but they specifically said "removing ads from video"
@@Subaru_Natsuki It sounded like they give you the choice. You can either block ads or have ads and be paid for watching them. So I was only really expanding on how the 'being paid to watch ads' side would feasibly work.
In so many industries there are pointless "middle men" who are only there to trick you into paying more, or being deceived, on your way to a product/service. You should question ANY group that gets between you and a service or product.
To be clear there are some cases that are hard to avoid, as an example supermarkets are "middle men" also, but you have no reasonable way to get groceries let alone at the massively discounted rates because of the bulk they are able to buy them at, this is because you can't get produce from the farmers or meats from the ranchers much of the time at all. Similar for many other products that you can't in the same way get products from a manufacturer. HOWEVER, there are many cases where "middle men" do nothing overall for the eco system besides taking money from you and usually refusing to give you the very product you are paying for.
Health insurance comes to mind
setting up a DNS...
Anyone remember the huge gpu scalper invasion during the pandemic (also PS5's)?
Those people dared to declare themselves as middle men service providers that deserve their 100% to 500% cut from the upsell.
as middleman, at least honey got the customer the opportunity to get a coupon or collect points towards a reduction... infinite more than what the influencers would give you back on the product economically
@@xyzbesixdouzeand that justifies them taking the commission?.. that's the crux of the issue. in my opinion that's illegal if not unethical at the very least
Right now, "Pie" ads are the ones I see most often on RUclips. (Before they, cough, get interrupted.)
Given that YT has been pitching an absolute fit about the sheer unmitigated gall of anyone using an app to prohibit their advertisements from running, the preponderance of ads for Pie makes YT's protestations a very bad joke. It's like a teatotaller's convention accepting ads for whiskey.
You aren't the only person saying that. It feels like they are dialing up their adspend literally as I type this.
@@UpperEchelon question, i receive a lot of OperaGX ads, do you reckon that's trustworthy or nah?
@@UpperEchelonI literally got a pie ad at the beginning of this video.
I’ve never actually seen a pie advertisement yet. But personally after the honey situation and reading the comments on the pinned post on the PayPal account. I’m never using them again. They’ve been stealing thousands. Either via PayPal themselves or their side companies. This is just the tip of the PayPal iceberg.
Never hears of Pie or Honey or had Ads for them, i only know about them from videos that expose them. Maybe they're targeting certain regions only ?
I first watched MegaLag's Honey expose and then stumbled onto this. Very well done. It is nice to know that people are on the case busting these scammers and bringing them to light. Keep up the outstanding work.
RUclips scam is pay us $30 per month for ad free viewing.
Every video just puts their own ads right back in.
If an "influencer" is shilling something, there's your first sign to avoid it.
The first sign is you actually giving your time and attention to influencers...
Literally the only thing I’ve ever decided to get from a RUclips sponsor was a VPN. And I’m on the fence about those data-deletion services too, but they don’t seem like a bad idea. Otherwise, naaaaahhhhh I’m good
@@fatcat22able not all vpns are the same. some siphon your data just like every scammer.
like ground news
@@fatcat22able Another monthly subscription service, and is it really and only deleting your personal data, or is it harvesting or bidding out access?
god im so glad you're talking about this. ive spent MONTHS blocking pie ads. they made hundreds in different categories like "books and literature" or "video games"
They’ve been in so many RUclipsrs vids too
Imagine wasting your time blocking ads
I'm so glad you are talking about this, I've spent DECADES blocking pie ads
@@23ButanedioneIf you want to change how the whole ad industry works you have to block ads. Not use an ad blocker. You have to tell Google what kind of ads you want. That way the people can get paid for their work.
@@23Butanedione Bot👆
I wish people would get it through their heads that nothing in life is free. If somebody is telling you to download/install something because "free stuff!", you're being scammed! Especially if the product is sponsoring RUclipsrs. Nobody has the money to sponsor people unless they have a scheme in mind. Truly free open source projects don't buy sponsor slots...
Well put. Agree 💯
I know right? But I cant blame ppl who are kids and teenagers. I'm 32 years old I had my fare share of believing the "free stuff" shit it takes time to learn how our reality works. But if you are an adult who don't know that it's really a problem for you.
linux apps is free stuff
Nothing is free but sometimes things are free to use. For example, in Scotland there's an initiative to provide free condoms in order to improve sexual health of the populace and especially young people. They're paid for by the government so they're not 'free' but they are freely handed out to anyone from sexual health clinics.
Things like PIE and RUclips are similar. Advertisers pay for adverts to be shown, which funds the services. The services are free for the user to use because the users are actually the products being provided to the advertisers. The services survive for as long as users are happy to use the service. The issue for these platforms is that users don't like seeing ads. So there's a constant struggle between showing more ads while keeping users compliant. RUclips has even seen this as a potential revenue source and offered "premium" as a way for users to essentially provide the money instead of the advertisers in order to avoid the ads entirely.
PIE seems to be going a step further and giving users a small cut of the money gained from advertisers. Probably something like 10%, or less, for each advert they watch. This keeps them compliant and willing to watch more adverts, because they think they're gaining something from it, and therefore allows the service to show more ads to more people and make more money.
Whenever you see a "Free" product, it's worth asking who your benefactor is and why they've made something free for you, and that should determine whether or not you use the service.
With things like the free condoms, the benefactor is the government and the intent is to win votes though a show of altruism and effective action. With things like youtube and PIE, the benefactor is advertisers and their intent is to shotgun their products into as many people's faces as possible so that people will buy their products and make them a lot more money back than the amount they spent on advertising.
nothing about pie or honey is open source. it is proprietary spyware. there is only one adblocker worth downloading and I think everyone already knows which one that is
Finally!!! I’ve been waiting for someone to bring Pie up, I keep getting the ads for it and it’s onnoxious
Here's another problem this creates: Over the last 5 years, I'm seen my favorite channels get sponsored by what turns out to be shady/terrible companies, causing me to literally skip over the content creator's ad reads. I even did it on this video. I don't trust the fact that I hear a Ground News ad read on almost every other channel I watch. I bet in 1-2 years, I'll hear dirt on them too. Sorry. I'm going to continue to use Brave browser to block YT ads, and I'm going to continue to skip over channel ad reads. If you don't want your content published and visible for free, I totally get it. Put it behind a subscriber paywall. Until then, I will continue to watch what I can for free, and when the free web dies, I will not be subscribing to anything. I already "pay" with unfettered access to my personal data.
Exactly. I will do anything to not see ads online and when that eventually means that the free web will die then so be it. It was fun while it lasted. They shouldn't have startet their services on the sole principle of it beeing free in the first place.
I think Ground News is legit, as it inherently has to provide links to its sources you would quickly realise if it wasn't. There are also bias checking websites which seem to concur that its neutral. Although I do get annoyed by the "created by an ex-NASA engineer", like that has any relevance to if the site is factual or legitimate?
@@alexatkin Afaik, the current biggest problem with Ground News is that their left, center, and right bias labels are based on the USA. So several things may be listed as center that would be listed as right leaning in, say, England.
Hopefully that's the worst of it, but I haven't taken more than 30 minutes to check it myself. (And ditto on how weird it is that they mention NASA engineer, maybe they're trying to bring Mark Roper feelings to it? I can't think of any other reason to mention NASA engineer, but again. Only 30 minutes of checking myself)
I’ve heard that Brave browser does the same thing that Honey does
@@alexatkin Ground News has you pay for content that’s otherwise available for free
Thank you UE for actually adding critical new information to the conversation and not just repeating MegaLag’s video.
I think just repeating his video is fine. It spreads the message further
@@arnold-t4pboth of you are correct! 🙏 additional notes are great and re-telling of the story in your own voice! Also valid 💪🏽💪🏽
@@arnold-t4p It’s almost never fine, support original content and creators in a world of Asmongolds.
Stealing the thumbnail of a video that’s been trending and tweaking it slightly to cover a different topic is a little weird tho, not gonna lie.
"ThAnK yOu, Ue"
Ugh, you sound like a commercial for self help 🙄
5:22 "a trusted LA-based company"
That's your problem right there, partner, ain't nothing trustworthy about LA
in all seriousness, if none of the things in this ad ring any alarm bells, I don't have much hope for you
Why say "trust worthy" for a browser extension anyway
The wildest thing about Honey was that Linus Tech Tips knew what was happening and DIDN'T TELL ANYONE.
By the looks of it, PIE does the same thing as Honey. They pose as the advertiser/affiliate to get the money.
Are you surprised? We all know Linus is a scumbag.
If you live in NYC you gotta take any cent that comes your way
@@ivanpetrov5255 I lost respect for Linus. He knew that ppl like him content creators being scammed and he was like I don't care as long as I won't get scammed everything is fine.
@Zydraxis From megalad's video, I understood LTT switched to a different extension - Karma. It's practically the same as Honey, down to the scamming. 😑
Honey pays RUclips. RUclips pays LTT.
LTT knows not to bite the hand that feeds you.
"Guys, why you so worried about the ads on RUclips? Chill just get PIE" I've seen that ad almost on every video I've watched for the last month.. I went to the site, and immediately clicked off of it.. Just didn't feel right. Saw Markipliers vid on honey and thought, now someone need's to talk about PIE, then yours showed up lol. Thanks for talking about this one as well!
5:30 that "creators of Honey" phrase has aged like milk 😅
It one that was there BEFORE their company got bought
Thank you so much for this video! I haven't watched your video yet (I'm literally writing this 16 minutes after you released a 17 minute video), but I knew something was probably off about pie. No amount of blocks or dislikes or settings changes could keep this ad from showing up.
bro get an adblocker - _a real one_
@@vaikjsf34a I don't use one at all on youtube. Not for any moral reasons, I just don't feel like it. I was referring to the youtube/google ad settings not letting me prevent it.
Simply assume that any browser plugin has access to everything you do in the browser. EVERYTHING.
This 100%! Thinking of any 3rd party plugin as "open window" to your house. That over time opens more and more.
Don't use any extentions, use Brave and keep it updated.
Absolutely. The fewer plugins you have, the better. And if you no longer need a plugin, go in and disable it. Things that used to be trustworthy have been purchased and turned into spyware before and will be again.
I read that in Gary Oldman's voice from The Professional
that is not true unless they exploit hitherto undiscovered vulnerabilities in the browser
@@Vikezor What do you think it takes to block an ad or rewrite a cookie or URL?
Honey literally never found me a single applicable coupon so i trashed it
These scams always target RUclipsrs for advertising since most RUclipsrs are self-employed and often naïve enough to blindly take the deal without doing their research.
I doubt people like mrbeast, ltt, mkhd are naive - they are deliberate in promoting this trash, they simply don’t care because they got truckload of cash. Staggeringly entitled rich people
@@zawarudo1041nah dude, if they actually looked into it they’d realize that they’re losing more money than they get from the sponsors
THANK YOU! I knew something was up with the pie ads even saw some reddit posts asking about it and now i see a video about pie that I’ve been begging to see.
The entirety of advertising is anti-consumer. I don’t just use Adblock, I also use sponsor block. I don’t want to hear about shitty product or shave my balls, I want to watch content/information. Anything that gets in the way of that is like an irritating bug you swat away by any means necessary.
Marketing ruins everything. The key is to train oneself to ignore the advertising. Finding and learning the tools to fight is to stay vigilant. Most people are lazy and likes being sold to.
@@AlenAbdula I dont agree that people like being sold to but folks are lazy and ignorant. without critical mass or revolution of philosophy nothing will change.
advertisement is fuel for inflation, creates degenerate antisocial cloudchasing and tries to addict and brainrot our children like cocomelon/tiktok... one would think that this parasitic overhad would be pushed out of the free capitalism market, but it's ideal for whitwashing and syphoning profits out of the business to avoid taxes that pay for the bricks and bones in society. ofc the repeating history of politics have made people sceptic about true nature of that last one
Then buy a membership from your preferred creators or fuck off.
Sponsor block is the GOAT
UE has been early on so many things before they happen its sad at times not seeing you getting some credit but at least i know of a consistently reliable source of info
He's early bc he rips video ideas and puts no effort into it, right down to the thumbnail. Its a 17 minute video of pure speculation with no hard evidence or research, half the video is him talking about MegaLags video.
wth do you mean by 'no evidence'?
He showed you the evidence linking the PIE and Honey company, if you actually watched the video, you would see that he shows you the LinkedIn page for both of them and made the connection between the founders of the companies.
That's hard enough evidence to show that they're operating similarly if you ask me. Besides, he also showed you that PIE has the exact same coupon "service" that Honey does.
Please for the love of god, watch the content you're talking about before complaining, this is embarrassing, dude.
Istg the PIE ads are some of the most annoying ads I get too. Thanks for the video!
I don't think I have _ever_ bought something due to a YT (or similar) ad, but I _do_ blacklist companies for making bad ones. Second time I saw a PIE ad, they got added to that list.
@yellingintothewind Only ad I ever liked on this site was one that was just, a music video. The whole thing. I got it multiple times and listened to it cuz I genuinely liked it. Idc about the normal ads, if I'm on RUclips it's either for entertainment, or information, often both at the same time, idgaf about some artificial plant garden or Mafia City.
@@asupremetab Agreed. Sponsored content in a tiny handful of cases is actually useful to me, but that's about it. I have bought a fair number of tools at James Hamilton's (@StumpyNubs) recommendation, and never been disappointed in the results.
Okay, I think this might be the first time I've seen your videos, but I immediately want to say I very much appreciate how much focus you put on the other sources and creators who are digging into the same topics you do, or who raise them to your attention, by name. Detailed citations may be basic practice in some fields, but they're also uncommon at times, and the focus you put into them in this context specifically stands out. Kudos.
RAID SHADOW LEGENDS.
WE ARE PROUD TO SHOW HOW SHITTY WE ARE
HONEY
WE ARE SHITTY BUT WE WILL ACT LIKE WE ARE TOO GOOD TO BE TRUE
I can't believe I am seeing Raid in a good light.
Middleman adblocker. Is that akin to what AdAware tried to do? Going to advertisers and say "hey, pay us to 'verify' your add isn't messing up the user experience... and we'll let it trough." That basically ended them.
Also, I think Pi-hole has a decent case for trademark infringement. Same name, same niche. Probably intentional.
Does Pi-Hole even have a trademark? I mean, there's probably a case to be made, but I'm not sure how likely it is to actually go through.
@@TheyCallMeIce I don't think Pi-Hole could even get a trademark if they wanted to just from the sole fact that their name comes from the Raspberry Pi, a separate product the software was designed to run on.
No, it's called "pi-hole" not "pie". While it is in the same space "ad blocking" they are clearly separate names. Of course any lawyer will tell both sides they could win, because they'd want the money. There is enough differentiation between them, and pi-hole does not own the word "pie". "pie" itself is not copyrightable, and probably can't even trademark it, as it is a common dictionary word used by literally everyone on planet earth. I hardly doubt a suit like that would be successful. "pi-hole" can be trademarked, but they called themselves "pie" not "pi-hole".
Honestly money being made through ads in the first place is the issue. Fraud is supposed to be illegal, but I've never seen an ad that doesn't just blatantly lie about the product. The entirety of our entertainment industry being funded by fraud would inevitably lead to horrible outcomes
Fraud is only illegal when non multi-million dollar corporations do it.
Yeah they get away with it too, the court will just call it "puffery".
Most ads are not complete lies. If it was a complete lie then that would open the doors for a lawsuit. That being said, over-the-top exaggerations do not open the door for lawsuits under the idea that it's obviously an exaggeration. The idea of ads is to sell a product or build trust in a brand, that doesn't happen if the ad is completely untruthful. While I do wish that more ads were upfront with what their product actually is and how it actually works, I understand why they aren't, It's hard to make an ad that is very transparent while also still being entertaining, it's not impossible, just hard.
For me it's gotten to the point where pretty much anything advertised on RUclips immediately gets added to my personal boycott list. After seeing the same add, for the same product, 20+ times a day... I'm just done. Honestly i though ad-algorithms were more intelligent than that. There has to be a point where showing the same customer the same add for the 573rd time, just doesn't move the needle anymore!
I appreciate the reporting on this... I was initially avoiding it under the 'too good to be true' angle, before they crossed my 'BS threshold' by bombarding me with 400 adds.
YEah partly this is because YT is scamming their advertisers out of some more impressions. Yeah we served 1,000,000,000 of your ads, but only to 1,000 people 🤣
The algorithm isn’t there to promote the right products to the right people. It’s there to convince advertisers that’s what it does while irritating viewers to the point they’ll snap and buy a RUclips premium membership to get rid of the maddening ads.
That and their AI is absolutely borked (but that, too, serves them)
Maybe as more folks talk about this subject of an aggressive, ethically questionable middleman company, we'll talk about far larger behemoths operating in a similar vein: health insurance companies.
The only upside is it steals from “creators”
We hate ads. We hate advertisers, marketing, commercials and plethora of other ways to waste my time. Which is obviously way more valuable than your time. We do not want to "get paid" for watching ads....we want ads to go away, disappear. Period. Thanks to PIE, we will continue viewing RUclips videos until it doesn't work anymore. Which is what happened to "ublock origin" ad blocker, which worked for 2 years until recently.
Have you ever asked how the creators who make the content you want to watch ad free should be paid for their efforts? I hope you pay for youtube premium so that they get something.
The answer is they shouldn't be paid at all. At least not as much as they do now. Going back to 2014 and previous levels would suffice, and honestly solve so many problems with modern RUclips.
@@PurplePotato-gr5jk gee, for more than one day a week of work, as a small creator, (on a different channel) I get paid $3 per day. You think I shouldn't get anything, just provide it out of the goodness of my heart. Do you also own slaves?
I am now waiting for the Ground News influencer scam any minute now.
🤣🤣🤣
I already dislike Ground News because I don't think the two sides of the political spectrum have equally valid opinions that should be given equal weight. I want my news to be politically biased. Thanks.
Kurzgesagt is a hint if you want to explore how they got into controversy, linked with ground news too
I thought they were just explicit about where the biases were?
I agree, though. There’s definitely a right side of history.
5:20 "Trusted L.A. based company" spewed by an influencer should be a dead giveaway
*I knew there was something off. I had to make sure it was true and you aren't wrong. The word needs to be spread. This is absolutely scummy.*
"People's Internet Experiment" is what I'm naming either my dystopian debut novel or my Alien Ant Farm cover band
Yet nothing happens to those PIE influencers like Optic or Faze after their controversies.
Block ads?
But then how will I know to füm while I use nord vpn to order hello fresh and buy manscaped products to use on my tiny square of land in Scotland?? 😂
remember that you can save money on ordering hellofresh with honey! if you don't know how to download honey, skillshare will be there to help
Honey was trash and was never was useful.
I uninstalled it after a week because it never gave me codes. Guess I dodged a bullet
My experience was even worse, not only did it not find me codes, it replaced the ones I already had with either nothing or lower than I already had. Like you said instant uninstall
"Was never was", huh? 🙄
I had wondered why RUclips was even letting the Pie ads run. It seemed scammy enough, but now that you point out the extra layer, it just gets worse.
There are pretty strong evidence they even copied the adblock part of their app from ublock origin, thus violating the gpl license (because their extension should be open source, to don't violate it)
I installed PIE once out of curiosity and IMMEDIATLEY uninstalled it because when I did, my browser detected a random file being installed to my computer with a complicated string of characters. I could just be confused but this extension seems very shady in what it actually does, I wouldn't trust it at all.
Man discovers how extensions are installed
@@NvidiaRTX5080there is a difference between extensions and random files being downloaded onto your hard drive.
Normal browser extensions don’t do that when you download them onto the browser.
@americankid7782 guess where the extension is stored 🤯🤯🤯
@@NvidiaRTX5080 in the browsers install folder. That is normal. That is all handled by the browser and is essentially invisible to the user.
The abnormal part is the extension trying to install files literally anywhere else because then it’s outside of the browsers system and the control of the browser.
If you spot that happening when you install an extension, that is either a program looking to collect extra advertising data, or (and more likely in most scenarios) it is some kind of system virus.
@americankid7782 they literally don't have that ability. The file you are talking about is the hash from the chrome store.
11:57 All those fake survey websites has trained my brain to automatically assume the app or website is a scam whenever they have fake loading bars like these that are designed to pretend like they're doing work when they aren't.
I hope your video absolutely kneecaps the upcoming advertising blitz.
If Google was against adblocking, why would they push out so much Pie advertising? That was what alerted me. It's as if Pie Adblock was working with Google!
As soon as I saw how many pie ads there were I knew this video was coming. Thanks for being proactive UE!
1:15 "I can't blame RUclipsrs for overlooking Red Flags" Well i can blame them, look at all the Massive channels promoting Honey and Pie, these channels have been on YT a long time, have millions or many millions of Subs and have whole teams of employees, they know what they're doing when they take the money.
i think you’re missing a lot of nuance.
You think RUclipsrs "knew what they were doing" when they actively advertised a service that poached money from them? Pretty sure if RUclipsrs knew about the affiliate hijacking none of them would want to work with Honey.
markiplier literally went out of his way to say that he wasn’t gonna promote honey bc it make him sus. it’s so easy. when these mfs promote things like better help i get so disgusted and have to leave a comment shaming them. it always gets backlash, but i don’t even care anymore. it’s known fact and it’s preying on vulnerable people
As soon as I heard, "get Paid to see ads" Immedient thought it was sus, I even looked to see on reddit if anyone else was skeptical, Ive never installed pie, just doesn't feel right, to get adblocker ads in youtubes AdBlock war
I find it very normal to be paid to watch ads. I find it gross how the whole internet thinks they're entitled to my time, bandwidth for their shitty ads, a few sure, but we're way past that.
RUclips blocks ad blockers and then spams me with ads telling me to go download this sketchy Pie ad blocker lmao. 🤣
pie ads became so obnoxious it literally convinced me to get ublock origin, and now i'm wondering why i didn't do that sooner!
the "How To Do CPR On Your Grandma" ad that youve likely seen everywhere has a clip of an old lady falling down escalators with a shopping cart. that old lady died from that. im all for shock humor and the like but using that to sell a product is so astronomically messed up its insane
Just realized RUclips's "Report" button does not include "Promotes product violating RUclips's TOS" option, but it definitely should. Won't solve the issue automatically, of course, but would help the audience be more specific in their feedback.
Also, regarding "pretty much all of your favorite RUclipsrs" - funnily enough this video is the first time I hear of Honey. Makes me wonder: 1. how large the audience intersection of UpperEchelon and these people actually is. 2. whether my very frequent use of "never recommend channel" helped me get rid of more trash in my life than I realize.
I’m not convinced that RUclips’s report button does anything - whether for videos, ads, comments, or profiles.
3:24 this is actually just literally how all RUclips ads work. They're all a normal video that is queued before the content you want to watch.
It's no coincidence that RUclips put the hammer down on adblockers _right before_ we started seeing an insane saturation of preroll ads for pie all over the place.
Thank you for this, I had a bad feeling from day one when these Pie ads started appearing that there's no way this can be good for creators OR viewers.
Cruel as it might sound, I don't have a ton of sympathy for RUclips influencers in this case. They've been peddling bad products and services (Manscaped, Raycon, Nord VPN, Raid: Casino Legends) for years, but now it's a problem when they're the ones getting the shit end of the stick? Yeah, no. Honey may be con artists to the highest degree, but I'm not gonna pretend like this isn't some sweet karmic justice.
Still they also deceive customers because they claim to give you the best discount coupons which isn't the case. I think Edge browser also has a coupon thing installed standard. So why use Honey anyways?
@@33rdframe RUclips will not let the creative burst through when there is money to be made.
In defense of the RUclipsrs, They are not experts at whatever it is they advertise, and it can be really hard to spot scams and shady products. At the end of the day, the RUclipsr is doing the advertisement because the need the money
@@33pandagamer In the case of Honey that might be true. But when it comes to products like Manscaped, Raycon, Established Titles, eetc. There's enough evidence to be found through a quick Google search as to why they're shady.
Not being an expert isn't an excuse to not do your research into what you're peddling.
@@33pandagamer it is in fact very easy to spot scams, see @grunner7557 answer
"Pie is the only ad-blocker that..." - *laughs in Brave*
Brave isn't much better
brave is good. sometimes youtube video has problems loading. i guess its because youtube trying to block the blocking.
Clearing browser cookies usually helps with buffering issues. If YT blocks you from watching videos because they finally caught the adblock, just clear your entire cache and it'll reset. Brave is very good.
@@thewhitefalcon8539 brave is way better. It's a lower level ad blocker, so it will always work better than ublock or any other extension purely on that premise.
@@wahtari03765 Yes, they recently had added modals nagging you that adblockers were bad and you a bad person for using them (lmao).
Took Brave a couple of hours to fix it. Granted, other extensions too. But why deal with extensions when it comes built in. _Someone_ is gonna sell my data; might as well be the inventor of JavaScript. 🤷♂
I'm so glad you covered this! I've just started seeing ads for pie in the last week, and I wanted to research it, but hadn't had the time yet.
I had NOT seen the ads that said if you chose to watch ads, you'd get paid. They may have stopped showing that add, because while the ads I saw were "red flag" enough for me to want to research it first, if I had seen that in ANY ad by them, that would have 100% set off my BS meter. What they had already said was enough for me to say "smells like bull, but I should look into it."
I will definitely look into the video you linked.
And somehow I missed Honey was a scam, but again, my BS detector was right about it, even though I didn't do the research on it. It fell into the category "too good to be true", which is right like 99% of the time.
Boy, I'm REALLY grateful I have a good BS detector!
Thanks again, UE. Much appreciated!
Honey was very recently exposed as a scam.
So that's why You probably haven't heard about it.
A smart guy looking out for those of us who arent so smart... I like it!
I'm so glad someone did a video on this. I literally thought of the specific video (of the insane number I've been forced to watch) referencing that "Pie" was founded by one of the creators of "Honey" when watching the "MegaLag" video. I immediately went through the comments to see if anyone had brought that up but if so I missed it. Hopefully more people find this because these scummy (downright illegal) ethically bankrupt practices, need to be exposed!
when I realized that PIE actually stands for "People's Internet Experiment" I got a f**king CHILL up my spine- holy F that feels so dystopian lmao
@@wfr878 ?
Honestly i was very suspicious of pie immediately because for me i was like "then do the creators i want to watch not get money anymore? That seems shitty." And now that the honey situation makes it obvious these guys mo is literally to be a parasite, stealing nutrients (money) from others, the pie thing feels way less shocking. Hopefully the situation blowing up makes people wary to try pie so less damage is done.
Also it just makes youtube look bad. Like you're telling me they're allowing a ton of ads to run... That say they'll take away RUclips ads? On RUclips? Surely RUclips has to run some checks on their ads. Or is money the only gatekeeper? It's insane
@@SunshineCo225 RIGHT? I'm not sure why RUclips are still allowing Pie's ads to run. It's been at least three months since I started seeing the company name.
I mean don't all ad blockers block creator ad revenue? Pie ain't exactly breaking new ground there.
@@kachowgang808yt4 you're not wrong but it's more just the fact that they're going so mainstream with it that's so... Off to me I suppose
@@SunshineCo225 true, my conspiracy theory is that since Pie's business model revolves around users choosing to be exposed to advertisements that are partnered with Pie, RUclips might have plans on partnering with them so they are the only regulated ad blocker on the site.
Guys let's make this video go viral like megalag's video, these people need to be stopped!
Noticed the flood of pi adblock ads and could SMELL it. Thank you for backing up my intuition.
The main red flag for me is that is it’s a “free” app that pays you money. That’s already pretty suspicious, but the constant sponsors make me raise an eyebrow. How does a free app not only pay its users money but give thousands of dollars to sponsor creators? The math ain’t mathin.
Pre-Exposing future widespread scams is the new meta.
Ngl I raised my eyebrow so hard the first time I saw Pie's newest ad from a RUclipsr.
Edit 1:
LAUGHS in uBlock Origin and Firefox @ that Pie ad
ublock and firefox is the best, I find it so funny that chrome users are so addicted to google services that they don't even care about having to see ads anymore
It in fact does NOT happen to every RUclipsr, Only the ones whose integrity is for sale, so resonating with that is telling..
I remember seeing some pie ads over on TikTok and then I started seeing them on RUclips shorts, I knew from the first one I saw that it was probably a scam. And I’m glad I wasn’t tricked by this one.
Absolutely love how at the bottom of Pie's website it proudly proclaimed, "Made in Los Angeles by the founding team that built Honey," and now it just says, "Proudly built in Los Angeles". Looks like someone figured out that associating yourself with Honey is a no go.
Remember folks, if the product/service is free, YOU are the product.
3 guesses what ad played for me right before 5:10
Pie?
@@AbolfazlMalekpour Yup. the trippy thing was it was the *exact* same ad.
Thankfully, I got videos warning about Pie, but not had an add for pie yet.
My 5min add was for microwaveable health meals 😂
Even before this I was very suspicious of a highly advertised adblocker. “Aren’t ads annoying” they say as the fill the space with ads
YEah someone mentioned and I agree, it is funny they are running ad block ads on YT ... But they are just making the ad problem worse.
Absolutely fascinating that these scams along with straight up "adult" AI ads are allowed, but using certain words to express myself with earns me a 1/2 day ban...