Good morning,

Today’s Stratechery Interview with YouTube tech reviewer Marques Brownlee (MKBHD). Brownlee, who has been posting tech reviews to YouTube for 15 years, has over 19 million subscribers to his primary YouTube channel, and every video he posts — including a recent interview with Apple CEO Tim Cook — gets millions of views. Brownlee has also recently started a second YouTube channel called Auto Focus about cars; Auto Focus recently surpassed 1 million subscribers in its own right. I wrote about Brownlee in April after his negative review of the Humane AI Pin led to critiques that Brownlee was too powerful.

In this interview we discuss how Brownlee became a prominent YouTuber, what it’s like to be famous, and why — unlike so many of his peers — he is still energized to be doing what he does. We also get into the nitty gritty of his business, including YouTube strategies, how monetization works, interacting with tech companies, building a team, and why success flows from putting viewers first.

As a reminder, all Stratechery content, including interviews, is available as a podcast; click the link at the top of this email to add Stratechery to your podcast player.

On to the Interview:

An Interview with Marques Brownlee (MKBHD) About Being a YouTube Star

This interview is lightly edited for clarity.

Becoming a YouTuber

Marques Brownlee, welcome to Stratechery.

Marques Brownlee: Thanks for having me.

I guess I should say Dr. Marques Brownlee, an honorary title given to you by Stevens College. How was your first commencement speech?

MB: (laughing) You don’t have to say Doctor, I don’t make anyone say Doctor, but I did get to give that commencement speech. It was fun, I think my theory is nobody really remembers their commencement speech, so it felt like there wasn’t a ton of pressure.

Well, they just remember who it was. I’ve interviewed some big names, but from my kids’ perspective, this is the highlight of my career and has made this all worth it, so they’re very excited to have you on, I brought them in to introduce you before. Anyhow, in this interview, I like to get into people’s backstory, and yours is interesting because you’ve filmed a lot of it. But take me back to the beginning, where did you grow up and what gave you the idea to review the famous HP Pavilion dv7t Media Center Remote?

MB: So I’ve always been into tech as far as I can remember. Grew up in New Jersey, and when I was in high school, part of that obsession with tech was just watching tons of videos about tech and just immersing myself in it just for fun in my free time, and it eventually became that time where I realized I needed a computer, my own computer for school, I needed a laptop. So it’s my precious allowance money, I’m going to watch every video on the whole Internet about every laptop available to me, so I’m watching all these videos and there’s tons of very helpful YouTube videos. I eventually find one, it’s that HP Pavilion, and I spend the money on it and I open it, I immersed myself directly into it immediately. And yeah, one of the things I noticed is nobody talked about this Media Center Remote that I didn’t realize came in the PCI slot, I didn’t even realize I got this. I watched every video, how did I miss this?

So I think the natural response for someone who just watched a ton of YouTube videos was to just open up the webcam and just make a YouTube video on the spot. Like, “Hey, okay, anyone who’s going to get this laptop, just so you know, this remote comes with it, here’s what it does”, and I just uploaded that, put it on YouTube, that was my first tech video. And soon enough, I made another video about, I don’t remember the second one, but the software that comes with it and the keyboard and the mouse, and I got a cooler for it, and I’m obsessed with this computer as my most prized possession as a teenager. That kind of was the beginning of the snowball of just starting to make a whole bunch of tech videos and having fun with it.

Did anyone watch that first video?

MB: I’m sure probably like 9 or 10 people watched it.

I’m curious, this bit actually I think is really interesting that you were watching a ton of YouTube videos before you bought your computer, and I guess because I think back, I read a ton of blogs and so now I’m a blogger, you watched a ton of YouTube videos. Do you think you were just oriented towards video in generally, or that’s just what you were immersed in? What was the connection there?

MB: Yeah, I think watching a ton of videos kind of put me in the natural state of that ecosystem being what I’m used to, and I kind of spoke that language already, so I thought of YouTube videos as an SEO answer to my questions. When I picture a YouTube video about a laptop, this video is for the person who is searching for those videos, because I was that person. So yeah, I’m just adding to the ecosystem of things that would be helpful to the next person buying a laptop.

Was that a focus then going forward? I mean, it strikes me as no surprise Marques is very successful, he’s already thinking in very strategic business terms where, “If someone’s going to search for this model and the media remote, there’s nothing there, I can fill that gap”. Was that sort of a motivation going forward or just did you get addicted to making videos? What was the process there?

MB: It was a little bit of trying to be helpful, I think, just because I know there’s going to be another person who’s just as obsessed as me and is going to watch all these videos, and this video that I’m making is for that person who’s going to watch them and wants to know more about this laptop.

But then also, yeah, there is also a fun element of it. It’s 2009, there’s not a whole lot of — it’s very early in YouTube days, relatively speaking — so it is kind of this fun, unique, interesting thrill of uploading a thing to the Internet and having random strangers engage with it in some way, and building a tiny community for yourself. That was also definitely a part of it after the first few videos anyway, when people started showing up.

Yeah, that’s an interesting bit, because I was talking to someone who’s doing a podcast and they were bemoaning that they only had a few thousand listeners, and I’m like, “Wait, let’s back up”, if you go back 20 years or 30 years, you have thousands of people listening to what you have to say, that’s actually pretty remarkable and it’s interesting, because I feel like if anyone started a YouTube channel today and they get a couple viewers, there’s probably a sense of discouragement that comes in. But because it was so early, it sounds like there was still, “Wow, anyone is watching”. That was sufficient motivation in and of itself.

MB: Yeah. If you put a few thousand people in a room to watch you record that podcast, you think about that number very differently, I think. I think because view counts are so public now, there’s all this comparison, but I think that’s still always going to be true.

So is that part of what got you hooked? Like, “Look, there’s people that I don’t know watching this” — what gave you the drive to start producing regularly? Before you were MKBHD, you were just a kid uploading videos to YouTube. What made you keep going?

MB: It kind of came directly down to, “These people are watching and commenting on this thing that I just made myself, I just made this, and people are here to see it and talk about it and maybe even give me improvement suggestions to make the next one even better”, so this direct little mini community thing felt really special and really fun and it was fun to just engage and jump in and talk to these people.

I remember actually there were other creators at that time, people even my age, other high school kids who were making tutorial videos, and we would all talk to each other on Skype and would chat about, “Hey, we should make videos about this kind of stuff. Well, we should collaborate, we should do a video on each other’s channels”, and that mini community was I think part of what hooked me in.

Was there a specific video that was an inflection point where it started, it suddenly began to be something?

MB: So I always say, if you look at the history of my channel, it’s very much a gradual graph the entire time. 15 years of gradual growth. But I will say there was a video —

By the way, that’s the same thing for Stratechery too. People expect that there’s some sort of big thing — no, it’s all just very steady, linear growth, that’s how it seems to happen.

MB: 1,200 plus videos over a decade, it just builds up over time.

But I do have a memory of an early video, I was making a lot of tutorials on free software, and I remember Safari coming to Windows for the first time, so Apple just made it available, their browser was coming to Windows. I thought, “Oh, this is really cool, I’m going to try this out.” I made a video on just how to install it and get it set up and get it working for the first time and published that, went to sleep, woke up the next day, and I think it had a couple hundred views or something like that, and I remember thinking like, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, this is very unusual to happen, I only have a hundred subscribers, this is more people than should be watching these videos”, and I think that light bulb moment was that people cared about timely, informative, helpful videos in a way that I could fill that niche. So even if it wasn’t an audience spike, it was more of a light bulb moment that I could be helpful and useful in this way.

And the timing mattered. Is that still the case with YouTube? You’ve got to hit a topic right when it happens?

MB: The tech world moves fast so if you are early to be helpful, you are probably helping the most people.

Life on Top

Yeah, that’s interesting. Well, that first video was 15 years ago, it seems to me as not-a-YouTuber — I have some channels now, but it’s clearly not the top priority — that YouTubers seem to burn out a lot. What has made it work for you to be on the top for so long?

MB: It’s a good question. The answer is, I am not the subject of the videos.

So there is a long history of YouTubers filling a niche by being the funny person or the creative sketch artist or insert other topic here, and a vlogger, something like that. They are inherently the topic of the videos, and in order to continue leveling up and continue being informative and entertaining or whatever it is, they have to level up themselves and for me, it’s the tech that’s the subject of the videos. I’m pointing the camera at the thing that has the pressure on it, which is the tech industry. Laptops, smartphones, AR, VR, whatever the next thing is so that has to a pretty massive extent helped me because I love tech, I always have, I don’t think that’s changing anytime soon. So I don’t feel burnt out as long as I’m playing with new tech every day. I mean, that’s kind of the dream at this point.

That makes total sense, I could definitely relate to that as well. It’s a great industry to have just the drumbeat of stuff going on. It’s not like I’m going to stop having opinions or takes about it, but it’s a great point, it grows on your behalf, you don’t need to evolve yourself. Could someone do what you did today if they were just starting out today? I know that the cliche answer is, “Of course, give it a try”, but is there some sort of reality that, well, it is a bit of a different world today?

MB: Yeah, I would say the barriers to entry are different. Some people like to say they’re higher, some people say they’re lower. I think yes, technically someone could do what I’m doing now, but what I’m doing now is getting my hands on the newest tech, making a video about it, uploading it online. The barrier to entry to that is lower for production than ever before because you have a phone, you can make videos instantly. But getting your hands on the tech is a high barrier to entry, you have to buy or rent or find a way to get your hands on from a friend. Some of this tech that is all over the map, it’s hard to get your hands on. But yeah, physically speaking, you can do it. But also YouTube is so saturated, so when you talk about growth and finding an audience and carving out a niche, it’s harder than ever because so much has already been done that it’s almost impossible to feel like you’re doing something that hasn’t been done before.

Yeah, that makes sense. I’ve talked about the, if you want to sit in your pajamas and write about the big five tech companies like I do, it’s going to be a tough entry point at this point, but if you could specialize on something, then there’s more opportunity like one company or one topic. But it feels like with YouTube, maybe it’s just the nature of people are more interested in video generally, it does seem like there’s more YouTubers than ever, but is there still a, “If you’re really, really good, you can still break through”? Is that still possible?

MB: Oh, yeah. The fact is on YouTube, there are creators breaking through all the time, they’re just breaking through in different ways every time. I feel like there are generations of YouTubers; I think the latest one would be short-form creators, I think Shorts are just getting thrown in your feed and getting shoved in your face now and there are creators who are blowing up getting millions of subscribers a month just doing short-form content and finding their niche that way too. So yeah, it changes, it evolves, but there’s always people breaking out in different ways.

To what extent do you feel pressure to evolve with YouTube? Shorts come along, you’re an established long-form YouTube viewer. Is that a, “Hey, that’s fine, someone else can do that”, or do you have to adapt the way you work based on what YouTube is pushing and what they’re not?

MB: It’s a little bit of both. I feel like it’s a little bit more that just as a creative person, you don’t want to do the same thing over and over again. So we could just do what we did ten years ago and just make one-take videos. It used to just be, I’d hit the record button, talk for five minutes, do the thing on the screen and hit stop and just upload that file. But as a creative video maker, I have this urge to try new things and maybe get better at editing or start using a camera and shooting new stuff, I think that is one of the ways we are always evolving.

But then to your point, yeah, there are YouTube features, there are algorithmic changes, there are waves and tides with the way that creatives pop up and disappear on this platform that also kind of feel like a pressure to stay on top of it, and I do feel that a little bit to an extent, but I know that I have a pretty good sense of which ones feel temporary and which ones feel like a flavor of the moment. I think as long as we’re always strategically, creatively improving, then we’re always on the right path.

What’s it like, to finish off the sort of personal angle, what’s it like being a celebrity now? I can imagine you walk down the street, everyone recognizes you. I’ve met you in person, you’re a fairly reserved person, I think is a way to put it. Is it unnerving?

MB: It is interesting. I do feel like it is cool that someone meeting me can be the highlight of their day, so I try to give that time, but it is also interesting. It kind of depends on where you are. If I’m at a tech event, of course, yeah, there are people there who have maybe seen my videos before, but there are plenty of instances where no one knows who I am, and it’s great too.

I have a memory of going to a YouTube Creator Summit, they had a YouTube-hosted event every year, invites a bunch of the top creators to come talk to YouTube executives and things like that, and they always say when you’re there, “Do not share the location of this event, because obviously there’s a lot of people here, we don’t want anyone to find out and then show up, so let’s just keep it low-key”. And every year, inevitably, someone accidentally does an Instagram story that shows the hotel we’re at or something like that.

So I remember the end of the event happened and we all go out to the lobby and there’s just hundreds of screaming little kids, screaming little girls, like, “Oh, we know they’re in there!” — they found out where we were somehow, and I called an Uber and I had to go back to the studio, and my Uber came on the street and I saw it, and I literally opened the door and just walked right through the middle of them and not a single one of them knew who I was, and it was great.

(laughing) You weren’t reaching the little girl audience that was screaming in the hotel lobby.

MB: Yeah, it was great. So there are target demographics, so there’s places where I know that there are people who may know the videos that I make, which is totally cool.

Yeah. I will say that’s one benefit of living abroad. I like to write about tech, I find it really interesting, I don’t think I’d be a great YouTuber. I admire what you do, but there’s a bit where — I’m not nearly as famous as you, but being well-known is key because that’s how you get new subscribers or new followers or whatever it might be. But it feels like, man, this is the key to my job, and it’s also the worst part of it, I would just really rather just be totally anonymous.

MB: Yeah, it comes with the territory.

Yep, it is what it is.

The Business of YouTube

So when it comes to the business of YouTube, what is the balance and how has that developed over time? When it comes to YouTube advertising, then there’s the addition of YouTube Premium, then there’s the promoted stuff that you do in the videos, you helped pioneer some of that, including some of the promotional stuff. How has that evolved or has it been relatively stable over time?

MB: How much time do you have?

A lot! I write about business, so this is actually the part that I’m very interested about. Please feel free to go deep.

MB: Okay, so the breakdown is there are a bunch of different ways that a creator can make money by being a YouTuber, and YouTube is that go-to platform for a lot of creators because it has been the most stable for the longest amount of time, and has the most well-established revenue sharing program of any of the social media channels. Even today, Instagram, TikTok, Twitch, they’re all trying to get to YouTube level. That’s also why you see a lot of people who start on TikTok move to YouTube.

Anyway, so advertising on YouTube is a pretty simple revenue share model — 55% goes to the creator, 45% goes to YouTube. So if you’re an advertiser like Samsung and you want to get your ad in front of a bunch of people watching YouTube videos, you will pay to put the ad there and then YouTube splits the money with the creator in that way. That’s basically the way the AdSense program works.

You mentioned YouTube Premium also. If you pay for YouTube Premium, you don’t see any ads, so instead, your watch hours get divided into a pool that gets split the same way.

Did that change your business a lot or is it invisible to you whether someone’s a Premium viewer or an ad-supported?

MB: I do see that YouTube breaks down, actually very helpfully, basically all of this stuff. I know it’s under 10% of the revenue comes from YouTube Premium subscribers, so it’s still mostly free, ad-supported views.

Do you get a sense of which subscriber is more valuable?

MB: Oh yeah, there is a heavy fluctuation throughout a bunch of different variables from demographics, age, to country to language to time of year to type of video. Famously, certain genres of videos actually have higher ad rates because those are the most valuable customers to get. If I was making credit card reviews or financial types of video, those are the highest CPMs, cost per mille, to acquire. So those are the ads that are getting incredible rates, and if you make a video that gets a million views about a credit card versus a million views about some makeup, you might get seven or eight times as much revenue on the credit card video because of that.

So they’re clear about this in their communication and the monetization, so there’s very clear incentives about what is valuable to make and what isn’t?

MB: Some of it is explicitly from YouTube, some of it isn’t. So if you go into your analytics, you can see things like revenue per country or per language or things like that. I think the ones that are a little more in the cloud, like what topic you make a video about, those things are unearthed by people talking to each other. I make YouTube videos about tech, so I see my CPM for all my tech videos, but I think people who make other videos will talk to tech creators or will talk to beauty creators or dance creators or comedy creators, and fill in the gaps by learning that way. But yeah, the tools are super useful for YouTube itself.

Does this actually influence editorial choices or what products to review?

MB: I think for some YouTubers, it does. I think that when people learn about different optimizations and how much of an impact they can have on their business, they will naturally steer towards that. For myself, I don’t think it really does. I think all of my editorial choices are purely for what I’m interested in and what I think will make the best tech video I can make.

Which, by the way, is how you last for 15 years.

MB: Yeah, exactly. But I do think there are creators who are optimizing for every single possible variable they can, and they will probably change their content as a result.

Interesting. Well, this makes sense. So the YouTube one, you get that for free, you’re on YouTube, they are going to monetize it, that’s super easy entry. But does it follow then the promotionals or when you have sponsored videos, they’re more valuable, but they’re just way harder to put together?

MB: There’s a threshold that you have to reach to achieve monetization on YouTube, but it’s fairly attainable once you start making regular videos. But yeah, you’re right, once you start to curate ads yourself and inject them into your videos, those are the most valuable because they are the most targeted, but they also take the most work.

I’ll use Samsung again as an example, because they make a bunch of products. If I’m Samsung and I just want to get my phone in front of everyone who watches YouTube videos, that’s a very broad audience. Some of them may convert, some of them may not. My amount that I may pay may be lower, but I’ll reach a ton of people. If I’m even more refined, I want my Samsung phone to get in front of people watching videos about phones. Now you’re like, “Okay, I’m being a little more targeted, but these are people who are more valuable to me because they’ll probably convert better, I will pay higher rates to be on tech videos or higher rates to be on videos that people from 18 to 35 in the US and male are watching, and I’ll pay more to be on those” — that’s how you end up with higher CPMs on MKBHD videos.

But let’s say you want to be even more specific, “I want my Samsung phone to be in front of MKBHD viewers because those viewers know about Samsung products already, they might be shopping for one already, those might convert at the highest rate so I’m going to go straight to Marques and pay him to inject an ad in just his one video”. You will probably pay now the highest rate per mille because you’re getting your most valuable audience there.

But then now there’s this whole process of, “Okay, you went straight to my inbox, so I need to negotiate the rate with you, I need to work back and forth on a contract and how many revisions of this video or this injection. What format? What style is it? Are we all on the same page about everything?” That’s a lot more work for the creator as well, so they’re getting paid better for it and they can work towards that goal, but there’s work that comes with that.

What was the first sponsored video you did?

MB: I don’t remember. I really wish I could remember that, I do have a sense of how long ago it was, but I wish I could remember, I’m going to have to look that up.

Was your biggest takeaway at first, “Wow, I can’t believe I’m getting this money,” and then afterwards, “Oh my word, I can’t believe how much work that was. I might’ve lost money”?

MB: I think a lot of the early ones were, “Wow, that was a lot of work”, and also, just the amount of time it takes to do that, because I’m used to a fairly regular cadence of, “I work on this video for 48 hours and it’s done”, but the fact that I have to send it to someone who then may wait 20 hours before asking for some revisions and then I send the revisions and it takes them 20 more hours, the latency was just something I wasn’t really used to early. So I think that was what struck me probably first.

Building a Team

When did you first hire someone else to work for you?

MB: First hire was Andrew [Manganelli], and I remember this was CES, I’m not going to remember the year exactly. CES is every January in Las Vegas, and it’s a tech consumer electronics show where you can go out and just make endless videos on whatever cool stuff you find, and I just needed someone there to hold the camera, help me carry camera batteries, all this stuff, I just needed someone to help me with this and I remember I did that CES, and I got back to the studio and I was like, “I need to add some help”. So he was the first hire, and I’d say that was probably around eight years ago, if I’m estimating correctly.

Seven years is a pretty good run on your own.

MB: Exactly, and so this was a pretty key moment obviously for understanding that as a creator, you can actually continue with your own creative vision while adding help on the pieces that are around that creative vision. I use an octopus analogy pretty often. I don’t know if you’ve heard it, but I feel like a creator is basically an octopus when they first start, because you’re doing multiple jobs at once. You’re a camera person, you’re doing the inbox, you’re doing the editing, you’re in front of the camera, the lighting, the sound person, you are all these people, and if you can find pieces of it that you’re not necessarily not passionate about, but that you could cut your arm off and hand it to someone who can do it better than you, because it’s their full-time job, that can allow you to be more focused, but it can let you be more focused on the things that you consider the core of your business, that you really think are what you’re most into.

Was that a difficult transition, to shift from being a creator to now you are the CEO of Marques Brownlee Inc., MKBHD Inc.? What was the toughest thing about that?

MB: It’s been a slow, very deliberate expansion, but it has kind of turned into that where yes, this is a new skill that I’ve had to develop, which is managing the team. I think that’s something that is learnable, and I did go to business school, and I did kind of pick up on some of this stuff, but it felt like it went from being me to me and one of my friends, to me and a few friends, to me and a small team, and now it’s me and 15 people, so it’s me and this group that is highly powerful and really curated and precise of what we do, but that all have the same goal in mind, so we’re like a robotic octopus.

Was that the key to really getting the sponsorship bit to take off, then? You can hand that off to someone else and do all that coordination?

MB: That’s one person, exactly. So the sponsorship bit, all the time that that took, all of the negotiation, all of that, that’s one person now on the team who handles that, that I was doing before. Actually, every single person on the team does something that I was doing with a fraction of my time before that they now do full-time. So whether that’s graphic design, motion graphics, whether that’s the research or the script supervision or a lot of this other stuff that adds to the overall quality of the videos is someone’s dedicated job.

So when you have a new video, do you generally have a pretty far-off timeline? And at this point, companies are communicating to you their upcoming products? What is the process? I’m interested in two process questions. What’s the process around a video and how that comes together now? And what is the day in the life of Marques? I think this bit is interesting where it’s still you, you are the guy in all the videos, but obviously it’s happening now with a team, what’s your overall involvement?

MB: I feel like we have several types of days. We definitely have pre-production days where we’re not necessarily shooting anything, but there’s a lot of planning, a lot of writing and researching and even brainstorming, and then we have production days where we’re shooting things and a lot of the editing starts happening and putting together the actual video. I live in a lot of those days every day.

Today, for example, we shot a video over the last couple of days, it’s going to be a tech in golf video that I’m really excited about. We’d shot that for a couple days before, and now we’re taking all the footage, and organizing it, and writing the connective tissue of all of what makes this video come together and then, we’re going to shoot it, and then I’ll probably start editing that sometime early tomorrow. There’s a couple types of videos that we make, but anything between 24 hours and a week pretty much covers our whole thing. We can put a video together in one day, or we can take our time with a big video like this and make it in a week.

Is it like movie-making, where you have everything scripted out, and then you just shoot what you need? Or what’s the balance on editorial decision making control pre and post-shoot?

MB: Yeah, I think, if it’s a review and we’re testing a product, we go through the whole process of figuring out exactly what we think of the product before, and then the entire review is basically written out, it’s almost completely scripted. For some other videos they’re a little less scripted, because there’s experiences in the moment that you can’t predict how they’re going to go. Things that aren’t reviews are a little bit less written down. But I feel like, yeah, a standard MKBHD review is pretty well-organized and has a process for it.

Have you ever considered making those reviews available in other formats, or are you YouTube only?

MB: We’ve considered it. I think, they work best as they are, which is as a YouTube video, they’re so optimized to be YouTube videos and there’s no doubt, I mean, I get told all the time, “Oh, you should cut these down and make them Facebook videos”, or, “Oh, you should make a written version of this”, and it’s always possible, but it’s just a matter of, “Is that worth the extra time that comes with that, the extra cost that comes with that?”, versus maybe the extra audience that comes with that.

You mentioned this before, but as you evolved, your production capabilities have increased, and your amazing gear has increased, and there’s plenty of videos about that. What’s the balance between, “This is really cool and fun versus”, versus, “Look, this is almost the price of staying on top”. Yeah, sure, you could use a phone to shoot, but if you’re MKBHD, you need to be shooting on the best stuff, that’s part of the package.

MB: Thankfully, almost all of us here at the studio are video nerds in some way, so it is actually really fun to try new things to try to separate our videos from the best. I think, you mentioned standing out, when a new phone comes out and the embargo drops and 15 or 20 people were testing the phone, at that moment, 15 or 20 videos all come out at once about the same phone. If I’m a viewer and I just logged into YouTube that day, how many of these videos am I really going to watch? One, two. Maybe two, maybe three if I’m really interested. There is an element of, “Why watch mine?”, I want to give you something to reward you for picking mine, and hopefully the packaging brings you in and then, there’s some production, or some music, or some insight, or some information, or something that is unique to my video.

I think some people can get carried away with this, where they’ll change the whole video to be, “Oh, nobody told you this phone’s terrible, even though it’s great”, they’ll totally flip it on its head. But we’re looking for a flare, a little bit of extra, which if you’re a video nerd turns into, yeah, some gear, some production, some robot shots here and there, some fun stuff like that.

Nice, robots. There’s a bit where I am super obsessive about audio quality for the podcast, and drive some of the people I work with off the wall in that regard. There’s also the bit where I just got this new Neumann mic that I’m using on the road with the Zoom F6, which does this amazing 32-bit recording. Number one, it’s just really fun to buy new gear and so that’s a benefit to it and number two, it can save your end result. So, I mean, any job that lets you both have a motivation, “I need to do it for my job”, but also lets you buy cool new gear, that’s a big win in my book. I can definitely relate to that.

MB: Yeah, we got all kinds of gear.

You have much cooler stuff than me, that’s for sure. But, there’s videos out there, we’ll link to some, like touring your studio. I think you said you’re building a new one right now, is that right?

MB: We are, yeah. That’s going to be an incredible space.

Awesome, we’ll look forward to the video about that.

Dealing With Tech Companies

What was the first company that reached out to you directly and was like, “Hey, do you want to review our product?”

MB: I might not remember the name, but I do remember it was, I believe, a keyboard for the laptop. So I had made some videos about the laptop I had reviewed the mouse I bought

This was your original HP?

MB: Yeah.

Oh, wow. So that happened really early.

MB: Yeah, interestingly. Yeah, I mean, I reviewed the cooler that I bought, and the mouse, and a bunch of software, and things like that, and some time in that first year or maybe two years, there was a keyboard, I want to say it was DSI. I don’t know why this is sticking in my brain, but there was a little keyboard that was literally just a Bluetooth keyboard that was an accessory for the laptop, and they sent it my way, and I checked it out, and I just reviewed it on the spot. Pulled it out the box, checked it out, messed with it for a little while, and delivered a verdict. So, I think that might’ve been the first one.

Interesting. So, it’s been basically a part of your channel from the beginning is interacting with companies and they’ve been plugged in and aware of this value or opportunity?

MB: Yeah, and definitely to very varying degrees. Some companies were very, very early to it, almost ahead of their time working with creators, and some of them have been sitting back a little bit, keeping an eye on it, maybe lately stepping their foot into the game. So, yeah, it depends on the company, for sure.

When did Apple first reach out?

MB: Apple was the late one.

That’s why I asked.

MB: Yeah, I remember I was the first YouTuber ever invited to an Apple event and it was probably only about six years ago or something like that.

I think I remember that, I remember me and [John] Gruber were talking about it, because I think that was Pre-Dithering, but it was notable. It’s like, “Wow, Apple has finally discovered that YouTubers exist”.

MB: It was interesting because it was one, and then the next event, it was four, and then the next event there was seven of us and I think we all noticed this, that they’d at least noticed it going well, and had increased that, and were starting to play with new things. Now they have a whole strategy, hey have a whole team dedicated to it.

Seems like a priority at this point.

MB: Yeah, it’s everywhere. They set up spaces for video production specifically, they have times for video production, so I think they understand that really well now.

On that note, I’ve interviewed almost every CEO in tech, I have not interviewed Tim Cook, but you interviewed Tim Cook last week. It was overall a great interview, there was a bit of a viral clip about the ergonomics of the Magic Mouse. Was Apple unhappy about that or did they roll with it?

MB: I didn’t hear anything from them after that. So, I can only imagine they were trying to figure out why — because you know what’s funny about — I don’t think they all really use every product all the time and I think a lot of them probably aren’t super aware of how bad the Magic Mouse has been talked about in the past. So, I think that was a new thing for them too.

(laughing) They’re definitely not serving the social media comments. I’ve heard Tim Cook just uses his iPad all the time, so his praise of that is definitely very legitimate.

How do you feel about this though? I guess it’s interesting, because for me, it was a real shock and shift, where I started out as this outsider, and bloggers have been around forever so I think it was easier to dismiss, where suddenly, I woke up and it’s like, “Okay, I had no access back in the day, now I have all the access in the world”, and thinking about out how to manage that and figure out how to navigate that was difficult. However, you because you grew up with it, and companies realized your value very early on, was that easier to manage, or was there a bit where you’re like, “Okay, Apple is here inviting me to this event, I need to change how I operate”? Or, was it not a problem at all?

MB: I think it started off first as pretty one-sided, because I had never done it before, so I had no idea why they were allowing me this access, or sending products even, and I slowly figured out over time that this was something that was super useful to my audience, so let’s make these connections. I think, it has grown over time to, at this point, now it has to be a balancing act.

I’ve mentioned before, I say no to almost everything in my inbox, 99 plus percent of the things that I get asked to film, or shoot a video at, or with, or interview, or whatever are “No”s. The 1% that I find a way and find the time to say yes to, there is a balancing act of, clearly there is something in it for my audience, but there’s also something in it for theirs as well, right? If it’s Apple for example, they’re not just giving Tim Cook interviews out just to have him do interviews, they have an incentive to have positive messages out there and to have questions about their latest event and their latest announcements and things like that. So, I have to understand that about every one of these opportunities and think about it deeply before saying yes to the 1% of things that I do say yes to.

Right, like if your incentives have sufficiently aligned.

The Humane Pin and MKBHD’s Job

We talked after that Humane Pin review and I wrote about you in response to a critical tweet that I went off on as well, you said, “We disagree on what my job is“. What is your job? When you wrote that tweet, it was in response to someone saying, “Oh, someone shouldn’t be allowed to move markets by making these critical reviews”, et cetera, et cetera. When you wrote that, what is in your head? “What’s my job?”

MB: Yeah, I mean, there’s a lot behind that. I remember specifically this massive — and this has happened before — but this reaction to how the company feels after review, how their stock price looks after review, I literally don’t care, I don’t pay attention to it, I’m not invested in any of these companies, I don’t care what the stock price is, whether it’s high or low.

My job is to speak directly to my audience, who cares about if the product is good or bad and that’s the basic outline. If the product is good, it’s my job to share that it’s good. If the product is bad, that’s my job to share that it’s bad. And of course, there are editorial decisions about what stuff I cover in the first place, and that’s a whole rabbit hole. But, in general, I think that person was implying that I should be nicer to not hurt this poor company, when that’s not my job here. My job here is to say, “Hey, is this product good or bad? All right, now you know”.

Is there any difficulty in sticking to your job? Or is it just actually pretty easy?

MB: No, in fact, it’s reinforced by stuff like that. I think we know if we’re getting off track, and we’re being a little too fluffy, and aren’t analyzing anything clearly enough, I think that gets tough. It’s clarified and crystallized by trying to figure out exactly what people should think of this new thing when it comes out.

What advice do you have for companies in this era launching products? Is it a different era just because of the way reviews work? Or has it just always been the case of, “Look, you have to release a good product”?

MB: It’s funny, in the era of social media, it’s actually more important than ever to actually release a good product, and I think that’s because product reviews are a genre of entertainment. There are people who are going to buy a product without watching reviews, and that’s fine, that’s always been a type of person, and you can always sell to that person.’

But I think there are way more educated and informed consumers now in almost every product demo, where if you’re coming out with a highly priced product, people are going to want to do some research first. They’re going to want to know exactly what they’re getting their hands on. “Is this the longest lasting one? Is this the one that’s going to be worth my money?”, and they’re going to find a bunch of honest feedback about the product posted online for the public to see.

So in this age, yeah, it does feel more important than ever, especially the more expensive your product is, to actually have a good product if you want it to be successful.

Well, you said a couple things there that were really interesting. So you have the initial Marques is like, “Look, someone is searching for this media center remote, no one has done it, I’m going to have a review there” but then, you said, “Reviews as entertainment”, which I think characterizes — I had to invade your private space, and I mentioned before, bringing my kids and saying “Hi” — they’re not buying products, they like watching YouTube.

I’m curious, was there a moment where you’re like, “Oh wait, people aren’t just searching for this product that I’m reviewing, they are subscribed to my channel, they watch every review, they’re enjoying products via me that they will never buy”. Was that a light bulb moment and did that shift your approach in any way?

MB: That was definitely a much later realization for me, that’s a really good point. I had that light bulb moment about people caring about timely information, and much later, I think I had to realize, I do separate my audience into two distinct buckets: the SEO bucket, which is, “I am searching for this product right now because I made a purchase decision,” and then there is just people who are subscribed to see the next video.

I probably should have learned this earlier because maybe the most common thing people say to me in person is, “Man, I watch a lot of your videos, and I don’t really buy any of that stuff, but I watch the videos anyway”, so I think that should make it pretty clear that there are people who are just trying to stay up-to-date, just trying to learn a little bit, be entertained, and there’s something about the tech videos, or the production that we have, or whatever it is, that they enjoy watching, so that the side benefit is they also happen to learn and maybe don’t buy the Humane Pin.

(laughing) I would imagine that’s actually a much larger portion of your audience. Do you think that’s the case or do you think that most people are actually going to buy stuff?

MB: I think what’s funny is I am mostly tailoring the production and the message in the videos for the first audience, but that is in fact a significantly smaller audience than the other one, and for whatever reason it works that I talked to this one audience, but everyone else watching is also enjoying that conversation.

Yeah, that’s interesting. Is there anything that you might want to change to cater to the second audience, or it’s like, “Look, this approach works so let’s try to stick to it”? Or is that what you meant by that Humane controversy re-solidifying what you want to do and what your job is?

MB: You know, I think there’s little pieces of our process and our production that are optimized for the larger audience. I think there’s the little memes, and the little entertaining bits, and little inside jokes here and there, and also I think packaging too when it comes to — I think if I’m reviewing a product, then I just title it, “Product A Review”, you can just end it there, and that is a normal title that you could just publish, and that would work for Audience #1. But if you’re looking to have something just be entertaining to a larger group, you need to play with packaging it for a larger group and the impressions, you’ll see the numbers if you look in YouTube Analytics, that it does work.

That was part the controversy of the Humane Pin review, right? “The review is fine, but the title…”

MB: Yeah. In a nutshell, I think people were like, “This title is clickbaity. Therefore, it is irresponsible,” and my response is, I spent a lot of time on this title, “This title is accurate and entertaining”.

Right, yeah.

MB: And as long as it is both, I think we’ve accomplished our goal.

YouTube Strategy

On the pie chart of what matters on YouTube, how important are titles and thumbnails?

MB: They’re at least half the story, because if you talk to anyone who’s been doing this for a long time — if your title and thumbnail are not good, the video does not matter. There are a few exceptions to that rule, where people can break through with an incredible video, with a horrible title and thumbnail, because there’s some incredible word-of-mouth or something goes viral. But generally, if title and thumbnail are bad, expect the video to perform bad. But on the same token, if the title and thumbnail are incredible, but the video does not deliver, YouTube actually learns from that, their algorithms are optimizing for audience happiness.

Interesting.

MB: And if people click at a very high rate on that video, and then realize it’s bad and then leave quickly, they will stop serving that video to you, so you have to deliver on both. So yeah, we do have to try to focus on making sure they match each other. They have an A/B testing feature now where you can actually see which title, or actually specifically which thumbnail, performs best. I wish they would pair that with titles, but that’s a whole other thing. But yeah, you have to deliver both.

What’s the specific balance between title and thumbnail?

MB: I think there’s an art form to pairing your title with your thumbnail. You can have text in your thumbnail that actually people read before they read the title because there’s this whole thing. If you spend enough time on YouTube, there’s a related video section, and there’s a big image of a thumbnail, and then a title underneath it, and so if you get creative enough, you can pair the imagery in your thumbnail, and some text there, with even a continuation of that phrase in your title, or a question in one and an answer in the other, there’s a bunch of stuff you can do with that. And then YouTube also has an A/B/C thumbnail-testing feature, but you can’t change your title. So you can have three different thumbnails with the same title and see which one does best.

Which has a big risk. If you go for the mixed thumbnail and title, you’ve got to nail it the first time.

MB: Exactly.

You talking about that, I feel like you’ve lit up. Is there still a bit about YouTube where it’s this 15-year game and it’s fun to play?

MB: It is. I mean it’s always evolving, and that’s why I think it’s most entertaining to talk to other creators, and to talk to people who work at YouTube itself, because you get all this insight, and you never finish evolving as a content strategy person.

I think to tie back in the octopus analogy, a lot of people don’t realize octopi have three hearts — I think there’s a species of octopus with three hearts, whatever it is — but the three hearts are the core to the business in this analogy. You’ve cut off all the other arms, they’re all doing this other thing full-time, but you have to figure out what the three hearts are, which are your core principles, your core functions as a creator, and for myself, I know that that is reviewing the products and that is content strategy. That is, “What will the next video be? How will we cover this evolution in some headline that came out? How will we talk this editorially?”, that’s the hearts of this particular octopus.

It sounds like one more is distribution strategy or almost like YouTube navigation strategy.

MB: For sure, just the whole ecosystem of online content in general. But yeah, it all goes hand-in-hand, and that’s just — living this thing for 15 years, you get immersed in it every time and it never stops changing.

I did have one question about your content. If you go to your page right now, which will probably be changed by the time this is published, you’ll have your golf video or whatever, you have a video essay, “AI the Product vs AI the Feature” and it’s in the context of Apple. It’s a great piece, we’ve definitely been thinking in the same lines in that regard. Is that something you’re doing more of, or you see yourself doing more of in the future, where breaking out of reviews a little bit? It’s catering to both people, both your initial audience and the entertainment audience, but it’s also Marques’ big-picture views on what’s going on. Is that an explicit shift that we might see more of going forward?

MB: Yeah. I think if you scroll back far enough, you will see that that shift has already started. I think probably five years ago almost every video that I made was on a product and maybe, if you scroll further, it’s mostly smartphones, so we went from doing a whole bunch — because smartphones were exploding: smartphone video, smartphone review, smartphone unboxing, to now doing, there’s tablets, there’s headphones, there’s computers, there’s electric cars, there’s TVs. There’s this whole world that’s all connected to tech. And AI, being such a forefront topic, there’s not a lot of products to talk about, but there’s still a lot of stuff.

I’m curious. Is the product space dwindling, to a certain extent, particularly once the smartphone wars settled down? And was that a necessary shift?

MB: I think there’s a couple of arcs. I think of it as an arc where smartphones had this really steep climb in popularity, and that was the prime time to make a lot of smartphone reviews.

2009 was a good time to start.

MB: Exactly. Now they’ve not flatlined, but what’s the difference between the iPhone 14 and 15, right? We’re very much slowing down how dramatic the innovation is between these generations of products, and so my goal has been to find other steeper arcs, and I think computers have some steep arcs. Electric cars, very steep right now, we’re right at the beginning of that. I don’t think it’s that devices in general are slowing down, I just think there’s different waves that you can jump onto and find interesting things. AI is very early and exciting right now, so that’s a wave that people are interested in watching about and learning about so yeah, as long as it’s interesting to us, we’d like to be able to comment on any piece of these waves.

But AI is this ethereal thing, it’s not a product, so it’s interesting. Do you feel AI has given you boost or energy? Again, this is a comment for myself. It’s been fantastic as far as me wanting to keep doing Stratechery. Do you ever feel like, “Is it time to hang it up?”, or you’re still interested and you’re ready to keep going?

MB: Yeah, it is very interesting to me. I think of it actually as on the opposite end of the wave as like crypto, for example, also very, very early and steep and exciting, but I just have almost — I’m so tired of it. I’m on the opposite of end of interest, so I just don’t make videos about crypto because I just don’t care enough to.

I think AI has been interesting because so many of these creative tools are being flipped on their heads, and so many creative jobs are being turned into tools and buttons and apps. This is a crazy, really interesting time to be watching this stuff. So yeah, I’m plugged in there. But then, yeah, crypto happens and I’m like, “How many of these are even useful a year after their announcement?”

Well, you’re following what you’re interested in, which I think makes sense.

MB: Yeah.

Is the next big MKBHD — are they going to be AI-fueled and AI-powered? There’s a bit where you have super high production values, you have a staff of 15, you can’t go in that, t’s almost like a disruption story, to a certain extent. Not that you’ll be disrupted, but you can’t go do that, but someone else will come along and do that, and that’s the way you look at it? Or do you see it actually impacting you and your workflows?

MB: I have started to see it impacting my workflows, but in a good way. I’ve seen it shrink the amount of time it takes us to do things that would take a long time, which is I think good for us. It’s not replacing jobs right now, it’s not replacing people, but it is turning things like Content-Aware Fill into a button in Photoshop, that sort of thing throughout our entire workflow. It is making it easier for me to brainstorm and elaborate on things in script in that process, it’s allowed me to come up with interesting, unique alliterations or titles in videos, things like that.

So I think this AI boom — yeah, anyone who’s going to be doing this is, to some extent, AI-fueled, and it’ll be up to them how much they want to really plug in and use these tools. But that’s just what they are to me, is tools that are exceedingly more and more useful to us.

I’ve saved the most important question for last. How does it feel to make Team USA in Ultimate Frisbee?

MB: Yeah, it is an honor, it is very exciting. I did mention this on Twitter, and the fact that this will be taking a little bit more of my time this year, some training camps and some practices with these teams, but as someone who’s been playing the sport for almost 20 years now, it was one of my highest goals, and I’m very excited to be a part of it.

It’s awesome, it’s so cool. I loved playing Ultimate Frisbee in university, but unsurprisingly, it fell off a bit, by which I mean completely. It makes me think about the success of pickleball, actually. My friend jokes that pickleball is tennis for normal people. Is there, or could there be, a pickleball version of Ultimate Frisbee, or is that just playing catch?

MB: It probably is. I’ve played maybe one or two times pickleball, but I think I see the discourse because it’s blowing up, it’s very popular. There’s people building courts everywhere. The thing about Frisbee though is it’s pretty accessible, all you need is a disc and a field, so I guess the easy version is smaller field, probably just playing Mini.

Is there already? There’s officially a Mini Ultimate?

MB: I mean if you have a whole football field, you can play full-size Ultimate Frisbee. But I think if you’re in college and you don’t have that much space, you’re just on the quad on the lawn or something, you play a smaller version of it, that feels successful.

There’s nothing funner than the super long football-win throw, you’ve got to stick to that.

MB: Exactly.

Are you a receiver or are you the kickoff? I don’t know what the terms are.

MB: Yeah. I have been using this term that gets groans, but I feel like I’m a bit of a hybrid right now where I’m connecting the dots between the handlers and the receivers when I’m on offense.

Handlers, Yeah.

MB: Handlers, yeah. There’s a bunch of quarterbacks floating around, there’s a bunch of receivers floating around. I’m bouncing between them connecting the dots. I feel like that’s my strength on offense.

You’re saying you’re the heart of the Ultimate Frisbee octopus, is what it sounds like to me.

MB: The glue.

That’s right.

MB: The glue, yeah.

It is a pleasure to talk. Thank you for coming on and it’s great to follow you, and look forward to more in the future.

MB: For sure. This was super fun. Thanks for doing it.

---

This Daily Update Interview is also available as a podcast. To receive it in your podcast player, visit Stratechery.

The Daily Update is intended for a single recipient, but occasional forwarding is totally fine! If you would like to order multiple subscriptions for your team with a group discount (minimum 5), please contact me directly.

Thanks for being a supporter, and have a great day!