The dangers of sacrificing quality and Integrity for growth

I use a lot of YouTube tech channels as white noise to cover the irritating hum of PC and other electronic devices in my office. Yesterday I came across a video by Gamer’s Nexus discussing Linus Media Group’s channels Linus Tech Tips, ShortCircuit, and TechQuickie. The issue being that “LMG”, has made a increasing number of ethical, accuracy, and quality missteps recently.

The content of the Gamers Nexus’ discussion aside, this video apparently struck a cord with the tech community and LMG appears to be feeling the backlash already. Gamers Nexus (1.96 Million Subscribers) released the video titled “The Problem with Linus Tech Tips: Accuracy, Ethics, & Responsibility” on August 14th 2023 and as of 6:30 A.M. PST it had 202K Thumbs Up and 3.3K Thumbs Down. At the same time, the most recent video released on the LMG Channel Linus Tech Tips titled “Why is EVERYONE Buying this Mic??” on August 14th 2023 around 6PM PST has garnered an amazing 20K Thumbs Up and 21K Thumbs Down in just over 12 hours.

*Note: An additional 1K Thumbs Up and 2K Thumbs Down were added between the time the screenshot was taken and this was posted.

In reading the comments for this most recent LTT video on the Fifine A6T Mic, it’s clear that the impact of the push for growth over quality is taking a toll on the responses to the video. While their were a number of comments relating to the proper way to test a Mic, I’m not going to get into that, many comments circled back to information from the Gamers Nexus video.

It’s one thing to just be a content mill and have that as your business model but quite another to put out inaccurate and misleading content on a regular basis when your “Brand” has been known for quality and accuracy. he lesson here is that you can’t build a brand on quality content and shift to producing content for the sake of having more content, without angering the community that made you.