Now, unless you strictly prefer your doomscrolling on TikTok and Instagram exclusively, you've probably sat through an insufferable YouTube sponsorship from a creator you watch. Whether it's right at the beginning of your video, after the intro, or near the end, YouTube sponsors such as NordVPN, BetterHelp, and Honey have proliferated in both their ubiquity and popularity among creators. So much so that it feels as if almost every scripted video on the platform has incorporated them.
These sponsorships offer additional revenue to creators, who earn either through affiliate links on products or through being paid based on viewership counts.[1] Simply put, the number of views or clicks they generate equals money paid to them by advertisers. This process —commonly referred to as conversions— is the primary determining factor that brands use to assess whether a sponsorship is worth the investment or not. As Influencer Marketing Hub explains, while sponsorship models can include promo codes and other metrics, affiliate links and view-based payments have traditionally dominated as the common forms of YouTube monetisation, as they are quick, easy and instant methods to measure conversions.[2] However, a new and less short-term incentive has taken root in modern sponsorships and marketing, one that relies not on instant conversions but possible future customers.
In October of 2024, journalists Whately, Bradley, and Moses released a report on Business Insider on how MrBeast has been courting brands for sponsorship deals.[3] Their investigation uncovered leaked court documents. Of these, a pitch deck was sent to General Motors, the world’s fourth-largest automotive manufacturer by production.[4] And I know what you're thinking. A car manufacturer even considering the sponsorship of a children’s YouTuber sounds absurd. Yet what if I told you that this was actually a common tactic used by brands all along to cultivate future customer loyalty?
The justification being that targeting children at a young age plants early brand awareness and increases the likelihood of future purchases through what psychologists refer to as the mere-exposure effect. The Branding Journal describes this effect as our tendency to prefer things we encounter repeatedly, noting that familiarity builds comfort and trust over time.[5] In short, the more you see something, the more likely you are to buy it. But this goes beyond just routine marketing.
The logic behind repeated branding exposure lies in modern markets being riddled with information asymmetry. There are simply way too many products and not enough time or incentives for consumers to evaluate them all. Or, as the 'father of public relations' and pioneer of American wartime propaganda would put it "If all men had to study for themselves the abstruse economic, political and ethical data involved in every question, they would find it impossible to find themselves come to a conclusion about anything" [6] Now Bernays was speaking of mass opinion and American elections, but this "question" of choice could easily be applied to our purchasing decisions as well. For a more down-to-earth explanation a teacher of mine often uses this anecdote of his to illustrate this phenomenon. Imagine walking into a supermarket and being confronted with an entire aisle of ketchup. Faced with this choice, what would you buy? The familiar and trusted Heinz everybody knows and loves, or one of the hundreds of competing brands you know nothing about?
In other words, the brand with the strongest marketing presence and the deepest foothold in the consumer’s subconscious memory is the one most likely to be purchased. General Motors’ marketers understand this, as does MrBeast’s team; hence, the promise of “100 million plus” future customers outlined in the pitch deck. But the most insidious part is not that we make our buying decisions based purely on habit but the fact that we defer to such mental shortcuts based on our influences from a young age, especially if that influence is from authority.
In his infamously famous obedience experiments, psychologist Stanley Milgram demonstrated that ordinary people were willing to partake in actions they believed were harmful if instructed by a trusted authority figure.[7] While Milgram’s work focused on obedience rather than consumption, the underlying mechanism can be applied more broadly. When authority figures normalise and recommend certain behaviours, people are far more likely to comply without critical evaluation.
On YouTube, creators act as modern authority figures, particularly for younger audiences. Children do not encounter advertisements in isolation, but through figures they trust, admire, and emulate. When a creator like MrBeast endorses a brand, the recommendation carries the weight of authority rather than appearing as a traditional advertisement. Even if children consciously forget the specific promotion, the association between authority and brand familiarity remains.
Sponsorship strategies as a whole have shifted away from instant conversions and more towards long-term brand building aimed at children (as illustrated by the GM pitch deck). One already begins to ask themselves about the ethical considerations of this. A good case study in deceptive marketing is Honey, the coupon-finding browser extension released in 2012. In a recent three-part exposé, YouTuber Megalag revealed that the seemingly harmless coupon extension, acquired by PayPal for four billion dollars, had engaged in illegal data harvesting practices involving minors.[8].
To add insult to injury, MrBeast has also played a pivotal role in the brand's meteoric rise to fame and now accounts for more than a third of Honey’s YouTube sponsorship payments. Even having one advert where he tells his young fanbase to "go to every computer in [their] house [their] moms, [their] dads [their] sister [their] brother's computer and install Honey." This strategy illustrates how early unsolicited exposure can create habitual consumer behaviour through social influence. That's not to say that children lack agency entirely, but that their evaluative frameworks are still forming, making early associations more permeable than when older. To brands this promise of becoming the next Heinz in a possible future generation of consumers' minds seems to be far more valuable a strategy than the paucity of short-term conversions.
So where does this leave sponsors? Consumer distrust in advertising has skyrocketed, and it feels as though almost every day the brands most desperate for attention are exposed as deeply shady and corrupt in their business practices. From BetterHelp exploiting vulnerable individuals seeking mental health support to Skillshare’s opaque and difficult cancellation processes, the pattern is hard to ignore. And consumers and creators have taken notice. Countless YouTube sponsorship blocking extensions have become available on the Chrome Web store and Mozilla Add-ons. With the most popular “SponsorBlock” already having, as of 2026, 2,000,000+ Chrome users and 659,000 on the Firefox equivalent.[9] What these do is automatically skip over the section of the video with the sponsor-segment mimicking adblockers in functionality.
When a product’s success relies disproportionately on authority-based persuasion and early psychological priming rather than transparent value, it raises serious ethical concerns. As countless exposés have revealed, Honey and GM are just two bullets in a much larger barrel. If a product or service were truly good on its own it would survive and stand out simply through consumer trust, longevity, and genuine word-of-mouth—rather than psychological priming or deceptive sponsorships. Lies do not make a good or unique selling point. Honesty and ethics do.
And so, I leave you dear reader to decide if your trust and effectiveness of the YouTube sponsorship has died or if it will self-regulate and be left alone to continue its tactics of using our cognitive biases and human flaws against us undisturbed. But one message remains clear.
If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.
Last updated: 08/01/2026
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