Linus Tech Tips is a veteran YouTube gadget and tech review channel that landed in hot water this week over the quality of its content. Channel co-founder Linus Sebastian appeared in a video at the end of June in which he reviewed a PC water cooler from Billet Labs—in the video Sebastian noted the poor performance of the cooler and blasted the company. A video from fellow tech reviewer Gamers Nexus pointed out that Sebastian incorrectly mounted the water cooler to the CPU, hence the bad performance, as well as pointed out a series of concerns with Linus Tech Tips’ video content and reviews, arguing that the sheer amount of content published by the company in order to feed the YouTube algorithm involved cutting corners.
The Linus Media Group team, including Sebastian, CEO Terren Tong, CFO Yvonne Ho, and head writer James Strieb, announced that they would be taking a week off from their production schedule in a video published yesterday. In a poor attempt at levity, the team also made jokes about the video being sponsored, plugging the channel’s merch store, and lewd sexual content. After the reception to the apology video was less positive than expected, the Linus Tech Tips account revealed in a comment that they would be switching off monetization, indicating that the video was receiving revenue during its first few hours of being published.
At the same time, former team member Madison Reeve posted a lengthy Twitter thread describing her time working for Linus Media Group. Reeve said that she was overworked and belittled by superiors, causing her mental health to suffer. Tong told Kotaku that the media company would be bringing in an outside investigator to assess the workplace culture.
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