Much like life itself, YouTuber sponsorships are fleeting. Just blink once and you’ll miss it. When you least expect it, they have already moved on to whatever VPN or meal kit will pay the most. While they may want you to think that every sponsorship is a product that they personally use and matches their core values, it’s hard to believe that when every YouTuber is sponsored by the same product. There’s always a product that you’ve never heard of that appears out of nowhere to fund the content of every YouTuber you’ve ever watched and just as quickly as they appear, they dissolve into the night. So since nostalgia pays so well, let us take a trip down memory lane and go through our favorite products that you could not get away from for months, despite nobody you know actually owning one.
5. Manscaped
Up first we have the company that made your favorite YouTuber read off way too many cringey puns about pubic hair. You would think you accidentally clicked onto Home Depot’s website with how they confusingly name their products, with their flagship being “The Lawn Mower.” Though to be fair, an actual lawn mower would probably shave your balls just as well, if not better.
4. Loot Crate
Since everything is a subscription now, of course there is a subscription for gaming and pop culture merch. Lootcrate started when its founder, Wes Hartman, had an epiphany: “You know loot boxes? Everyone’s least favorite feature of every game? What if we did that in real life?” The company saw success until it filed for bankruptcy in 2019 after its subscribers ran out of space for more stuff.
3. Raycon
They are cheap earbuds for the price of premium earbuds. For a while, you’d be hard-pressed to find a single YouTube video that didn’t have a 2-minute insert of the YouTuber putting in their RayCons while explaining how much they love them more than any other earbuds. We were supposed to believe that these things were the cream of the crop despite looking like earbuds you’d see on the counter in the checkout line of a store that doesn’t even sell electronics. These kinds of earbuds are a dime a dozen now, so this isn’t really that unexpected.
Speaking of the unexpected…
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2. Air Up
Do you wish your water smelled like artificial flavor? Me neither, but for some reason now it can. Air Up is a water bottle that uses “scent-based flavor” to add flavor to plain water. Just add one of their scent pods onto the top of the bottle and supposedly your brain will be tricked into thinking you are drinking flavored water. There really is a market for anything. Shockingly there’s no “Hot Girl Bath Water” flavor which is very surprising given the demographic.
1. Established Titles
To finish off, we have somehow the only thing on this list that is an actual scam. This company’s business was selling titles to a 1 square foot plot of land in Scotland, since owning any amount of land in Scotland makes you a “lord” (according to them). This company made a killing off of tricking customers and the YouTubers they were paying for advertisements into thinking they were actually buying land when in reality it was not possible to sell such small plots of land in Scotland. All YouTubers who were advertising for this company cut ties after it was revealed that their customers were being misled, and their website now refers to these fake titles as gag gifts.
The funniest part is that they’re not even based in Scotland. They’re based in Hong Kong.
