Creator Weekly: Honey Scam, Instagram AI Profiles, Top YouTube Updates

Author

Peggy K
January 04, 2025

Hello all! I hope you had an excellent new year’s celebration. 

Mine was with my family at home, and pretty quiet.. We watched the fireworks on TV and around the neighborhood where enthusiastic folks were setting them off. 

There wasn’t much news this week, which gave me time to finish my end-of-year roundups.  Read on for all the details. 

Top news and updates this week

  • 10 years of Creator Weekly! A look back at 2015.

  • The top YouTube updates of 2024.

  • Honey scams affiliate revenue.

  • Outrage about AI-generated Instagram profiles.

  • YouTube requires advanced feature verification to create new channels.

  • YouTube advertiser friendly guidelines prohibit instructions for AI-generated nudity.

  • Bluesky now shows trending topics

  • 2024 recaps from Bluesky, X, and Google AI.

  • More reading about AI power use, the woman who keeps the “most indispensable machine in the world” running, music videos, problems with passkey technology and the war on Wikipedia.

Ten Years Ago This Week

To celebrate 10 years of Creator Weekly, I’m sharing highlights from 2015. 

On January 3, 2015, I published the first edition of the Creator Weekly! Click the link to take a  look back at the big updates in 2015 (it was a year of change for Google), and the changes the newsletter has undergone over the years.

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The Honey Scam

If you shop online, you are probably familiar with the Honey extension. 

The PayPal-owned service promises to find you the internet’s best coupons for your online purchases. Such a deal, right?

They have also sponsored a large number of YouTube videos, with promotions by big channels like Mr. Beast and MKBHD.

But how does Honey actually work? 

Just before Christmas, the YouTube channel MegaLag posted an exposé. 

There is an issue for consumers: Honey makes deals with merchants, who get to select the discount Honey offers, which means they probably are not the best on the internet. 

And a bigger issue for creators: If someone clicks an affiliate link on a channel description or blog post, the affiliate gets credit for that click and usually gets a cut of any sales. 

What Honey does is replace any affiliate code with their own. 

That means creators who rely on affiliate revenue are essentially cheated out of that when the Honey extension is used. And that not only affects the creators who promoted Honey, but pretty much anyone on the internet who earns from affiliate links.

There is already a class action lawsuit, spearheaded by LegalEagle on YouTube.

If you are a digital content creator (video, blogging, social media), and think you might want to sign on to the lawsuit, you can sign up here.

And if you use Honey, consider whether you would rather support a creator instead.

Would you follow an AI-generated Instagram profile?

In the last week of January, Meta’s VP of product for generative AI Connor Hayes told the Financial Times they would be creating new AI profiles. 

“We expect these AIs to actually, over time, exist on our platforms, kind of in the same way that accounts do. They’ll have bios and profile pictures and be able to generate and share content powered by AI on the platform.”

With that freshly in mind, people stumbled on some older AI-created profiles on Instagram and Facebook, and discovered they are terrible. 

As 404 Media reports, the worst are gross caricatures with profiles full of bad AI images, and that chat as if they are actual people with posts about “their children” and advice from “personal experience.”  

People also discovered that those profiles can’t be blocked. 

Meta explained that when they referred to AI profiles on the platform, they were talking about an undefined future time, and those profiles don’t exist yet. 

They also took down the old profiles, in order to fix the “bug” that was preventing people from blocking them.

It’s hard to know what the business plan is. Maybe AI-generated profiles that post AI-generated content that get comments from other AI-generated profiles? Who needs people? 

But the immediate outrage this week suggests that even if some people like AI chatbots, they won’t be launched without criticism.

Video Creator and Live Streaming Updates

As of December, YouTube requires access to advanced features to add new channels to their account. Creators can use phone verification, identity verification, or have sufficient channel history. You can check your channel feature status in YouTube Studio on the web under Settings > Channel > Feature Eligibility. Learn more about how to get access to advanced features.

In December, YouTube updated its advertiser-friendly guidelines to prohibit content that gives instructions or promotes content about  how to create synthetic (such as AI-generated) content that is sexually explicit or contains nudity.

WordPress Christmas drama. May 2025 be more normal!

Social Media

Bluesky now has a trending topics list. Click the search icon and you’ll see top trending topics, currently only in English. It looks like a lot of sports topics.

Bluesky’s 2024 in Review. They officially launched in February, with a community of 3 million people and they closed the year with almost 26 million users. 

More AI Updates

New Meta AI tips from Instagram.

More Reading

An interesting article about someone who helps keep important technology running: It’s the Most Indispensable Machine in the World—and It Depends on This Woman 

Thanks for reading! 🌼