In defence of Marques

Well, this has escalated, hasn't it?

I was made a director of a business at 27. I may have been younger, actually, but my memory is absolutely dreadful, so we’ll stick with 27. Whenever it was, it was young. Too young.

The business was small and the annual turnover was sub £1,000,000, but becoming a director of a company that had double-digit employees was still a big deal. Deep down, I knew that I wasn’t ready for it, but I wasn’t experienced enough to give it a second thought. So, I leapt at the opportunity.

The ten years that followed that appointment were among the hardest I’ve experienced in a working environment. There were enjoyable moments, of course, but there were also a lot of mistakes made by yours truly (and, collectively, as a board).

I wouldn’t swap those years for the world and I certainly wouldn’t be sitting here now running this company without them. But having watched the backlash against Marques Brownlee’s new Panels app this week, I was reminded of how quickly you’re forced to grow up when you find yourself in a position of power.

For those who aren’t aware, Marques Brownlee is more commonly referred to by his YouTube persona, ‘MKBHD’. Since 2009, he’s been publishing tech reviews in a style and with a cadence that has encouraged nearly 20 million people to hit the subscribe button on his channel. He’s widely regarded as one of the masters and forefathers of the craft and has inspired countless others to pick up a camera and do the same.

I’m one of those people.

I should note that the level of success Marques has achieved during his 30 years on this planet far outweighs what I’ve achieved during my 43 years here. Today’s ramblings, therefore, are not intended as a direct comparison between the two of us. Regardless, I do have a sneaking suspicion that I know exactly how that guy feels right now.

This month, he launched Panels, an app for iOS and Android which requires users to pay either $49.99 per year or $11.99 per month to access a “handpicked” selection of wallpapers for their phones.

It has gone down like a fart in a crowded lift.

The backlash was immediate and fierce. The complaints targeted everything from the pricing strategy to the app’s user interface, and, more damagingly for Marques, the apparent excessive data disclosures that were included within the app. The point so many people were making was clear: how can a tech reviewer who has built a reputation for judging product quality launch something that appears to go against everything he believes in?

The criticisms are mostly fair. For the record, I think Panels is ludicrously priced. Arguably, it shouldn’t cost anything at all; to monetise it in some way, why not add a user tier which requires an email address to be exchanged for access to more wallpapers, thus enabling Marques’ team to nurture that user for relevant product sales elsewhere? Or just give Panels away in a bid to further extend Marques’ influence beyond YouTube.

The sheer weight of negative feedback has forced Marques and his team to respond by saying they’re “fixing it”. Marques himself took to X earlier this week to reveal how his team were responding to the criticism, noting that “part of building in public is getting mass feedback immediately, which is pretty dope”. Unfortunately, if you look at the comments threads on any platform where the subject of Panels is raised, it becomes clear that the feedback he’s received thus far is anything but dope and is potentially incredibly damaging for his carefully curated brand. A case in point is his recent YouTube review of the Pixel 9 Pro Fold; instead of the comments being full of people discussing Google’s foldable phone, they’re chock-full of witty, derogatory one-liners about Panels. It’s not a good look. At all.

The big question is: how did this happen?

I think I know. There are two possible reasons Marques decided to launch this app in the way he did, but they’re both based on the same assumption: Mr MKBHD wasn’t the sole arbiter of Panels.

The first scenario is that he simply conceived, designed, and built the app with his immediate team - you know, the guys who appear on The Studio YouTube channel. There will doubtless have been some external assistance for app development, but the nuts and bolts of Panels were screwed, tapped, and hammered into place by the guys who genuinely seem to be a nice bunch of happy MKBHD employees. The problem with this scenario is that it is an inherently young team. At the time of writing, Marques is just 30, and unless time has been incredibly kind to the rest of his team, I don’t see any of the others pushing much further beyond that.

There’s nothing wrong with young teams in businesses. They have the energy, stamina, and lack of inhibition to try stuff from which we older folk might shy away. They’re yet to encounter enough crap in their working - or personal - lives to become in any way disillusioned, fed up, or regularly in need of an early night. The trade-off is, as you might expect, that lack of experience; sometimes, an older hand is required to guide an idea to completion. Panels needed the eye of someone with that experience. How it has been developed, launched, and subsequently disaster-recovered reeks of inexperience.

The second scenario is one where people with more experience were involved in Panels - at least during the conceptual stages. Marques has built a powerful media empire with a monthly viewership and a degree of influence that most TV networks could only dream of these days. That kind of business can attract the wrong people - the wrong consultants, non-exec directors, and investors. Such people have a vested interest in the businesses they assist: their portion of the bottom line. It’s not hard to imagine Marques being guided by a non-exec director who identifies the potential conversion rate available for an in-house developed app. To make it profitable, that app would need to be cheap to make, immediately visually appealing to the target demographic, and priced purely to make a profit.

Marques’ reputation? The optics of a guy creating such an app when he has indirectly forced businesses into liquidation following a poor review of their sub-par product? The people advising Marques aren’t thinking about that. It’s all about the bottom line.

I might be way off with this. I’ve never met him, but it’s always struck me that Marques appears to be a genuinely nice lad. His absence from the ‘real’ world of work has actually done him wonders; he remains relatable, street-smart, and endearingly shy. I’m still a huge fan of his work and I owe a lot to him for inspiring me to start and build Mark Ellis Media into what it is today. I just have a sneaking suspicion that he needs to surround himself with some more experienced people who understand not just how to run a profitable business but how to also build and maintain a reputable brand.

There’s nothing wrong with early success or ladder-climbing in business, but I think Marques may be experiencing his first significant growing pain with the launch of Panels. I suffered plenty of that during my early days as a company director, but it was always an injection of experience that saw me through the worst times - and I was always a better man for it afterwards.

Oh, and if you’re wondering, no, I won’t be reviewing Panels.