Marques Brownlee, sometimes known as MKBHD, is a renowned tech YouTuber. His career as a content creator began in 2009, when he was in high school. He remembered saving his parents’ allowance to buy a laptop at the time.
“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 not only wanted to buy a laptop, but he was also picky about the model of laptop he wanted. He opted to purchase an HP Pavilion dv7t after being satisfied with the results of his exhaustive study.
He gave his parents a passionate presentation, and they encouraged him to acquire the laptop. In his joy, he wanted to share his great accomplishment with the rest of 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 began to create more engaging videos, and after graduating from Stevens Institute of Technology, he chose to pursue his love full-time. On his YouTube channel, he became a tech reviewer, reviewing anything technological. In 2013, former Google senior vice president Vic Gundotra referred to Brownlee as “the best technology reviewer on the planet.”
Other notable accomplishments for the YouTube star include becoming the only tech reviewer to feature on the hit internet show “Hot Ones” and having his own trademark sneaker. He now has over 17 million members on his site and has interviewed celebrities such as Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates, Kobe Bryant, and Barack Obama. According to Forbes, he has earned a total of $8.5 million, making him one of the world’s highest-paid content providers.