This is not his first misstep and it’s a double one: Marques Brownlee angers his 20 million subscribers as a speeder and with advertising.
Which YouTuber is being talked about? Marques Brownlee is a tech YouTuber with nearly 20 million subscribers. In his video “How My Video Gear is Changing!” he presents a new camera, but forgets to clarify aside from a brief mention a few minutes in the video that this is a sponsored format. The manufacturer of the highly praised camera had paid him.
And then there’s the sequence where he drives a sports car on a road with a speed limit of 35 miles per hour (about 60 km/h), going a whopping 96 (about 155 km/h). His community is coming down hard on him for it. According to viewer observations, it’s an area close to a school:
96 miles per hour near a school? What the hell?
Comments of this kind, including reports from those affected by traffic accidents, are piling up under his video. He then resorted to the digital scissors.
If you want to read about how students built a spy glasses to showcase dangers of technology, you can find an article from us here or directly the video of the students:
Apology from Marques Brownlee
How does Marques Brownlee behave? In the meantime, the few seconds long part by the YouTuber has been removed, but images from it can still be viewed on Reddit. Additionally, he apologized in a post on X:
In the last video, I did something quite stupid. […] There was a clip with the action camera where I took a test drive in a car and drove way too fast. Absolutely inexcusable and dangerous.
I have now […] cut it out. I also understand that it looks like I’m trying to cover it up, but I think it’s the right thing to do. There’s no reason to keep this clip in (there was no reason to include it in the first place) and I would never want to give the impression that it’s okay by keeping it in the video. […]
I can only apologize and promise to never do something so stupid again. This is a terrible example and I’m sorry.
However, he can hardly save his reputation with that, because as Kougeru writes on YouTube: Editing out the crime doesn’t make it disappear.
He does not elaborate further on the only inadequately disclosed payment by the manufacturer. He just refers under his video that he takes the feedback on “sponsored videos” into account.
Marques Brownlee meanwhile has not been in the negative spotlight for the first time. Recently, we reported about an ongoing attempt to market a wallpaper app. The crux is: Screen backgrounds can be found freely available all over the internet. But he tries to profit from it by offering them in the form of a subscription.
If you want to dive deeper into the world of tech YouTubers afterward, you can find interesting things in the above-linked articles. Or you can read about how JayzTwoCents scored a PC deal on the used market and surprisingly accelerated it with two simple settings. Perhaps the options used here may also be lying untouched in your UEFI.
