Over the last few days, a number of controversies and situations have exploded around the large tech media company Linus Media Group, which runs several popular YouTube channels including the venerable Linus Tech Tips.
If you couldn’t guess from the names of these companies, the face of these channels is a guy named Linus Sebastian — and he’s someone that I was a fan of for many years. He started out humbly doing some product promotion on YouTube for a computer store in Canada called NCIX. Then he spun that out into his own company, where it grew and grew and grew until it had over a hundred employees and a recent valuation of around $100 million dollars.
That’s a long hard road to travel from making unboxing videos on a borrowed camera in a borrowed living space — and Linus did it by balancing generally good tech information with entertaining goofy overtones and weird high concept ideas. His main channel has walked the entertainment/information tightrope for years, and mostly pulled it off — though lately, it’s starting to fall apart. These new revelations paint a picture of overworked staff members grinding away at content like a robotic content farm, pushing for numbers and uploads above all other things, leaving accuracy and integrity behind.
