The YouTube tech reviewer with more followers than tech media

Harry McCracken of Fast Company profiles YouTube technology reviewer Marques Brownlee, who has become an influential voice in tech coverage.

McCracken writes, “Brownlee, who turns 30 in December, has come a long way since he began shooting videos about tech hardware and software in his family’s suburban New Jersey home at age 15. (He uploaded the results under the nom de YouTube of MKBHD—for ‘Marques Keith Brownlee’ and ‘high definition’—a moniker that has been synonymous with his own name ever since.) By the time he was in college, he was a phenomenon: In 2013, Google’s then senior VP of engineering, Vic Gundotra, declared Brownlee ‘the best technology reviewer on the planet.’

“Brownlee’s rise reflects a fundamental transformation that has played out in the tech-review ecosystem. In the past, tech critics gained power through their affiliation with major news outlets. But as the old guard moved on—The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg and The New York Times’s David Pogue both left their print perches in 2013—YouTube offered upstart reviewers a platform that no traditional media brand could match, especially for reaching young people who’d grown up on the internet. Today, YouTube is the top social media platform among 18-to-24-year-olds, with 84% usage, according to Comscore; the second-place finisher, TikTok, lags far behind at 61%. And Brownlee has spent the past decade amassing more YouTube subscribers than the Journal, the Times, The Washington Post, and USA Today combined.”

Read more here.