How Marques Brownlee became ‘the best technology reviewer on the planet’ at 20 and made $8M

Marques Brownlee is a popular tech YouTuber known by his alias MKBHD. His content-creating career dates back to 2009 when he was in high school. At the time, he recalled saving up his allowance from his parents to buy a laptop.

“This all started back in 2009. I was a child in high school basically, and I was saving up my precious allowance money and wanted to know what laptop should I buy with my precious $5-a-week allowance from raking leaves and taking out the trash,” Brownlee said, according to Afro Tech.

He did not only wish to buy a laptop but was also particular about the type of laptop to get. After satisfying himself with the outcome of his painstaking research, he decided to buy an HP Pavilion dv7t.

He made a passionate presentation to his parents and they supported him to get the laptop. In his moment of excitement, he wanted to share his new achievement with the world.

“It felt like the natural thing to do was to flip open the laptop, turn on the webcam, and make a video about the things that I’d found so that the next kid who was going be in my shoes, buying a laptop, watching every video in existence for their precious allowance money to get their laptop would have more information to choose from,” he said.

As he got comfortable around the web camera, he began creating more videos. His breakthrough came when he did a video tutorial of him downloading and installing Safari for Windows.

“It’s a kid in high school in his bedroom doing a video. And I had a couple dozen subscribers at the time. I went to sleep. I woke up the next day, and I think that video had like a thousand views, and that was a lot at the time on YouTube,” Brownlee said. “It was like this light bulb moment that, ‘Oh, people really care about timely, valuable information, useful information in a timely manner.’”

He then decided to generate more entertaining content and right after college at the Stevens Institute of Technology, he decided to turn his passion into a full-time career. He became a tech reviewer, reviewing anything technology on his YouTube channel. In 2013, former Google senior vice president Vic Gundotra called Brownlee “the best technology reviewer on the planet.”

The YouTube star’s other achievements include being the only tech reviewer to appear on the hit digital show “Hot Ones” and having his own signature shoe. Today, he has over 17 million subscribers on the platform and has also interviewed big names like Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Kobe Bryant, and Barack Obama. According to Forbes, he has made total earnings of $8.5 million, making him one of the top-earning content creators in the world.