Marques Brownlee falls firmly into the “OG” YouTuber category. The tech reviewer, also known as MKBHD, started posting tech videos on YouTube for the first time in 2009 as a young teenager, with software tutorials and webcam shot reviews of hardware such as the remote control that came with his HP laptop came.
Thirteen years later, Brownlee has one of the most popular technology channels on YouTube with 15.8 million subscribers and is a respected voice in the industry. In addition to reviewing the latest technology releases, Brownlee has brought top executives like Sundar Pichai, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and Elon Musk for interviews on his channel and podcast.
As the creative industry expanded into new mediums and saw an impact of influencer brand transactions, Brownlee said the majority of his revenue still comes from ads on YouTube, allowing him to be more picky about the brand transactions he does accept. But he also spent time growing his audience on platforms like Discord, where he and his team host a server, and recently introduced a paid premium level of $ 2.99 per month for superfans.
sit with The Hollywood Reporter, Brownlee reflects on the rise of TikTok, why the life cycle of a digital creator is similar to that of a pro-athlete and why he maintains confidence in YouTube’s “stature” as a video platform. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)
How has the creative industry changed since you first started?
I feel that there are different prototypical forms of a creator’s bow. Many of them start with a peak, maybe something goes viral, and they try their best to maintain it. A lot of people start by making a bunch of stuff and then crocheting something, and then it’s like a shelf. Mine was just like a steady ramp – nothing too crazy. Nothing really blew up in the beginning or anything like that. But the pandemic was interesting because we had this wave where everyone had a bump because more people at home were watching content, so it was fascinating to see what everyone’s post-pandemic activity looked like.
I hear from many creators who say, “Diversify your presence. You need to be on more [platforms] as one. ” How did you think of that, given that you started on YouTube and it’s probably still your bread and butter?
Right, definitely still the bread and butter. But I do think diversification is evergreen good advice for almost any creator who wants to turn [this into] their work. But it’s not just diversification, it’s the end of it. You want to find the best ways for you to diversify. So for some creators they learn a lot of things, so many of them will make their own course or do something in that direction. I just did one with David Blaine, who is now kind of an online creator, who’s cool.
Discord is another one where we have this community that is super, super enthusiastic about technology and wants to talk about it all the time, so we have these Discord channels and this premium section of our community.
For creators, it is important to find your niche and find out what you are good at, but there is also the feeling that it is not necessarily sustainable to stick to one thing and just do it over and over again. You’re in an interesting place because, broadly speaking, you’re a technology reviewer and one could argue that it’s kind of like doing the same thing. How did you think about scaling up and bringing in new audiences as you grow your business?
It’s funny that you say it’s technology, which is good, because that’s what I want it to be. But it started as an even narrower thing. I only made software tutorials for, like, 300 videos and then it was like, OK, enthusiasts like a bit of hardware. And then smartphones had this big boom, and it got a little wider as we went along. Now, anything with an on-button is game, because technology is everywhere now: electric cars are technology, TVs, headphones, travel, smartphones are still a thing. I’m interested in a lot of things because technology is everywhere.
However, it is not even necessarily scale. We’re building a team. We want to make more, better things.
What does it look like?
I described it as an octopus. As a creator, your work is a bunch of different things at once. You are the camera person, you are the editor, you are the author, you handle the inbox, you do finances. All your eight arms, all doing different things. Building a team was like cutting off one of these arms and giving it to someone who can do it much better on his own than I ever could.
The other stupid analogy is octopuses have three hearts. Pret fact. So you have to figure out what the hearts are, because those are the things you can not really cut down and give to someone else. I know I’m a content strategist at heart, I’m a tech reviewer at heart. These are the things I’m going to keep doing.
When you go back to YouTube which is your bread and butter, when you saw TikTok start to rise and YouTube have Shorts, you felt pressure to start switching from your content to short forms to meet that question or to meet what this platforms are pushing?
No, but that’s just because I’m so confident in YouTube’s stature as a video platform. When I go looking for the new iPhone [and] I have to watch a video about it, what should I do? I’m going to youtube.com and looking for the thing. If it ever changes, if I go, ‘I want to see what the new phone looks like’ and I go to TikTok – a small number of people do it, but I think it’s actually a new audience popping up instead of people it takes away from YouTube. It does not feel so much like a push, because it’s just me dipping my foot into a new pool.
We found some success and some fun things to try in the short form world. But the bread and butter are still a lot of technology videos that help people form longer well, and that’s what we’re still focusing on.
Do you think short form is a fad and people will go back to long form?
No, I think it’s new and I think it’s here to stay. I think they can exist side by side. There will always be a 10-minute sit-down video, especially when making a purchasing decision. Like, OK, I have $ 400 dollars to spend on some headphones, I really want to make the right choice here. But just when it comes to entertainment, short form has really found its trot and I think it’s here to stay.
As for other formats that people are experimenting with, I have seen a lot of live shopping. You also look like a natural match for it. Is this something you want to focus on?
It’s kind of a different skill, live stuff.
You do not want to be like QVC, but …
This is for sure a balancing act. No, I & # 39 a creator to have a specific audience that I talk to like that. Things like live shopping are curious to me. I do not know if this is something in which I immediately dive full, but it is always worth experimenting.
Have you felt a change in the way brands approach partnerships with creators?
I have definitely seen many more of them that just pay more attention to how they do it. Este [perspective] comes from years ago in the earlier days – especially because I am so entrenched in technology – how technology creators were treated compared to traditional technological media.
Whether that means they spend more or less or decide to invest more to connect with those audiences or not differs across the board, but they all at least pay more attention.
Does this translate to more transactions?
Generally yes. That was not, to be honest, my big focus. [It’s a] super happy position to be in [because] I started it so long ago that it was a well-oiled machine and we have to be very picky about what kind of transactions we enter into because it makes the most sense.
When it comes to being a digital creator and having success, how do you struggle with careers that seem floating or short-lived?
I compare it to being an athlete. Many people want to be a professional athlete. But if you look at it, the life cycle of a professional athlete in most sports is floating and small. You get, like, five years of your heyday. If you’m lucky you play for eight, nine, 10 [years]. If you’re literally LeBron James, you’ve been playing for 20 years. It’s a short career in most fields.
Even though we think the life cycle of a creator is relatively short, I think there is a lot of potential for amazing things to be accomplished and for many cute things to do. And for the occasional 20-, 30-year career to exist, and that’s not necessarily a bad thing.