Linus Gabriel Sebastian & Linus Media Group / Linus Tech Tips - Narcissistic corporate shill YouTuber driving his media empire into the ground. KILL COUNT: 2

[Soggy paper straw]

The real question is why. While the long term financial trajectory is not great, the short term still seems fine and its rare for senior talent to walk themselves out over far future maybes. I'm wondering if the talent is hitting the point where the senior staff is underpaid -

Beyond pay, I wonder if it is an effect of simply growing up and becoming disillusioned that the "fun workplace of your favourite youtube" is staffed by eternal manchildren and that living inside an LTT video is not as fun as watching it.
There is also very limited growth in the company. Moving between companies is promoted among people of that age as the top strategy to have a higher salary. These guys probably see themselves as having potential and wanting to develop a career rather than simply doing the same job for 40 years. As you said, LTT is also not going to be there in 40 years, so why not jump ship after getting some experience?

I was bored listening to MatI, so I made a spreadsheet of LTT Channel views (11 total)
May-July was not cherrypicked, it's the prior 90 days and was the most unaffected by the August 2023 channel pause they did after the GamersNexus video and sexual assault allegations. I looked over the relative averages and think if anything, this range was exceedingly fair to Linus' channel performance.

View attachment 6263987

Some of the channels that were relevant in 2022 or 2023, have been strategically abandoned or are otherwise irrelevant, I've removed these below:

View attachment 6264013

Obviously, if you want to be *extremely* charitable to LTT, there are unaccounted views on their private site Floatplane and via podcast feeds, but imo these numbers are basically irrelevant.
I don't think I appreciated just how pronounced the drop has been over the last few years.

This is a very big drop! I don't think anyone cares enough, but I would love to see how well the videos with his face perform vs where he is not there.

I completely understand why the "short" content videos dropped so severely.. technology does not develop so much that you need new "tips" or "explanations" twice a week, every week.

While floatplane is irrelevant, what could keep him afloat is the chinese channel and tiktok. No idea how he does on either of them

 

[GosuGopher]

I would love to see how well the videos with his face perform vs where he is not there.

I completely understand why the "short" content videos dropped so severely.. technology does not develop so much that you need new "tips" or "explanations" twice a week, every week.
While floatplane is irrelevant, what could keep him afloat is the chinese channel and tiktok. No idea how he does on either of them

I agree on the face thing, Linus has been up-front with wanting his "company" to outlive his personal involvement, which I think is frankly impossible. There are a small handful of secondary hosts that are decent/good, but the majority are completely uninterested and are just reading a script they had very little input in writing.
Beyond being on-camera and in the thumbnails though, I genuinely credit Linus with at least trying with his video ideas. Meanwhile his writing team's idea wheel is perpetually stuck on:
"Building the *random eCommerce website* Computer" or "reacting to *random past LTT thing*"

My baseless speculation was that he hoped the secondary channels would be opportunities to cycle hosts in and grow their experience enough for them to be viable stand-ins on the main channel, but I don't think that's really happened. ShortCircuit falling off especially seems due to them not wanting to take risks, a lot more Linus hosting than there was early on and they've been autistically focused on the same small handful of product categories (phones, wireless earbuds, laptops, and TVs)

 

[John Ligma]

I was bored listening to MatI, so I made a spreadsheet of LTT Channel views (11 total)
May-July was not cherrypicked, it's the prior 90 days and was the most unaffected by the August 2023 channel pause they did after the GamersNexus video and sexual assault allegations. I looked over the relative averages and think if anything, this range was exceedingly fair to Linus' channel performance.

View attachment 6263987

Some of the channels that were relevant in 2022 or 2023, have been strategically abandoned or are otherwise irrelevant, I've removed these below:

View attachment 6264013

Obviously, if you want to be *extremely* charitable to LTT, there are unaccounted views on their private site Floatplane and via podcast feeds, but imo these numbers are basically irrelevant.
I don't think I appreciated just how pronounced the drop has been over the last few years.

Thanks for taking the time to crunch and present the numbers like this, it's very illuminating looking at their overall company performance laid out like this. I'm surprised at the severe dips in views with Techquickie and LMG Clips especially. I don't believe they've taken any time off of the WAN Show during any of the last couple years and LMG Clips is particularly populated by clips of them taken from there, so there shouldn't have been any decrease in output on that channel at all - yet it lost over 30% of its viewership.

For what it's worth as well, the WAN Show has gone severely downhill in the last few months in my opinion. I've listened to it weekly for ~6-7 years now to get a conversational rundown on news happenings and events I may have missed out on in the tech space but recently the amount of educational, on-topic discussion is minimal. It hit a peak about a year ago when they were streaming it for 3-4 hours on average without much structure and getting somewhat deep into conversations regarding current tech news and things that interest them, but Dan coming in and formatting the show, plus the fat Jewish woman who they hired on as a writer for the podcast (Amanda?) have completely ruined it. I swear 75% of the content now is just Linus hocking merch like it's the Home Shopping Network and Luke sitting there in silence while he sorts merch messages. The other 25% is divided between advertisements for dbrand and quickly reading the title of a news topic, shrugging about it then moving on.

My baseless speculation was that he hoped the secondary channels would be opportunities to cycle hosts in and grow their experience enough for them to be viable stand-ins on the main channel, but I don't think that's really happened. ShortCircuit falling off especially seems due to them not wanting to take risks, a lot more Linus hosting than there was early on and they've been autistically focused on the same small handful of product categories (phones, wireless earbuds, laptops, and TVs)

Quite honestly the only secondary host that has seriously panned out and has a lot of potential is Johnathan Horst, the Mac Address guy. He does really well and he's charismatic/passionate enough to pretty much carry that entire channel on his back. Linus has said in the past that he basically gives him free agency to do what we wants with minimal oversight and it's clearly paying off. They had a severe dip in views, but as I understand it that's only because Horst got into a bad motorcycle accident and was hospitalized/recovering some broken bones for months.

 

[Kuritan Deplorable]

I swear 75% of the content now is just Linus hocking merch like it's the Home Shopping Network and Luke sitting there in silence while he sorts merch messages. The other 25% is divided between advertisements for dbrand and quickly reading the title of a news topic, shrugging about it then moving on.

That's a shame - I used to listen to the podcast while doing my usual chores years ago, but fell outta the habit. Replaced it with the Gamers Nexus news roundups, never really looked back.

Beyond pay, I wonder if it is an effect of simply growing up and becoming disillusioned that the "fun workplace of your favourite youtube" is staffed by eternal manchildren and that living inside an LTT video is not as fun as watching it.

I could see this. A lot of new people will enter and industry, and see whatever they first experience as 'normal'. But spend a few years, and eventually you're liable to self-discover a lot of the best practice the industry around you does, just by virtue of it fixing problems you likely hit. But being held up by everyone else being manchildren who don't want to improve would be infuriating, would drive you right out.

 

[Mark Robinson BussyLiquor]

LTT became even more gay! https://archive.is/RGudc

Linus gets ass fucked and sucks cock and eats cum. He eats cum out of his own asshole and also out of other people's random assholes. His wife also pegs him.

 

[Mark Robinson BussyLiquor]

1 - Linus's cat Shadow being killed with a dryer, allegedly on accident by the nanny he hired because actually raising your kids cuts into YouTubing.

Haven't PPP, Nick Rekieta, and Ethan Ralph all killed cats in their time?

Sonichu is fed by feline sacrifice.

Protect your cats. Protect your kittens.

Protect your tabbies. Protect your bengals.

Protect your calicos. Linus will kill them for a superchat.

 

[mandatorylurk]

Yep, I used to use WAN Show just as weekend honey-do background noise working on things but it's just not worth it, it's why I gave up doing summaries. That Jessica (the lesbian autist who writes for the show) is still with the company shows she's protected like Tranthony, she will never be told to do better.

I only watch Short Circuit when Plouffe or Dan review something because they have autistic insight into monitors/audio, and now this Elijah kid is becoming a host on it, I don't trust all these people with their quirk chungus forced energy. I can't believe Game Linked is actually doing well, none of the people at LTT come across like actual gamers with real opinions, they just like all walking simulators and 2D comfy tranny made games. Faggots must have a Riley Cringe tolerance I cannot understand.

 

[HootersMcBoobies]

unless your C/C++ code has lots of Intel intrinsics sprinkled all over it, it's just a matter of changing a single flag in your compiler instructions to get it to run. The only hard part of migrating from x86 to Arm was chasing down our third party lib suppliers and making sure they were ready to go with an Arm port when we were.

Take this with a very big grain of salt but people way smarter and clever than I that works with low code, says that this is one of the major issues with WOA(Windows on ARM), according to them, is that the Windows kernel has a lot of assembly code from the NT days that wouldn't make a lot of sense to code in assembly nowadays, they're mainly on win32 API's, so you have a lot of code that is hard to port to ARM because no one know what it does properly but apparently they almost fixed this by now

I think you'd be shocked to know how many video codecs are still coded in assembly. There are tons of optimizations used for vectorization and loop unrolling that also depend on really specific instructions (SSE2/3/4, the entire avx* set, etc.) And this isn't even getting into video games. There are a lot of reviews out there showing how a ton of games don't run at all on Win/ARM, and the ones that do tend to be glitchy and have a ton of artifact/performance issues.

macOS has little backwards comparability. The old Rosetta engine is gone, so I'm not sure if you can still run PPC apps on M* chips. Simple x86 applications will still work, but things that are more complex, and that aren't constantly updated, will often become buggy or even refuse to launch. 3D Games are notorious at not launching across major macOS versions.

Windows big selling point is a quite insane dedication to backwards comparability. For this reason alone (not even getting into the spyware as an OS and insane, unskippable cloud-account integrations) is why Win/x86_64 is going to stick around for a long time

 

[John Ligma]

Yep, I used to use WAN Show just as weekend honey-do background noise working on things but it's just not worth it, it's why I gave up doing summaries. That Jessica (the lesbian autist who writes for the show) is still with the company shows she's protected like Tranthony, she will never be told to do better.

I only watch Short Circuit when Plouffe or Dan review something because they have autistic insight into monitors/audio, and now this Elijah kid is becoming a host on it, I don't trust all these people with their quirk chungus forced energy. I can't believe Game Linked is actually doing well, none of the people at LTT come across like actual gamers with real opinions, they just like all walking simulators and 2D comfy tranny made games. Faggots must have a Riley Cringe tolerance I cannot understand.

It's awesome because some of the hosts even admit mid-presentation on Game Linked that they don't know what they're talking about and they're just reading a news headline. There was a video a while back with Riley hosting where he said he'd never heard of Tekken and asked what kind of game it is. It's fine to have never heard of certain game franchises or whatever but it creates a host/audience disconnect when the person you're listening to might as well just be Text to Speech for a PC Gamer article.

 

[The Ugly One]

I think you'd be shocked to know how many video codecs are still coded in assembly.

Any video codec that doesn't work on mobile platforms or Apple computers isn't a video codec that matters any more.

The old Rosetta engine is gone, so I'm not sure if you can still run PPC apps on M* chips.

Apple dropped Power almost twenty years ago. Nobody cares. I'm sure there's some old SPARC shit that hasn't been ported to a modern platform, too.

Windows big selling point is a quite insane dedication to backwards comparability. For this reason alone (not even getting into the spyware as an OS and insane, unskippable cloud-account integrations) is why Win/x86_64 is going to stick around for a long time

Sure, but the fact is that Arm is now the #1 computing platform in the world. It's nearly 100% of mobile and about 10% of desktop.

The only examples you have of "things you can't do on Arm" seem to be running some ancient software in an emulator. Which, sure, but who cares? That's a miniscule part of the market, as important to a platform's success as whether or not you can run a COBOL database on it.

 

[ForkyMeetsPorky]

Take this with a very big grain of salt but people way smarter and clever than I that works with low code, says that this is one of the major issues with WOA(Windows on ARM), according to them, is that the Windows kernel has a lot of assembly code from the NT days that wouldn't make a lot of sense to code in assembly nowadays, they're mainly on win32 API's, so you have a lot of code that is hard to port to ARM because no one know what it does properly but apparently they almost fixed this by now

Odd, since the Windows NT kernel (What modern versions of Windows use) was designed to be portable across different CPU architectures from it's inception, in the 90s you could run it on PowerPC, Alpha and MIPS alongside x86. There was concern that CISC processors like x86 were reaching a cap in their performance, and that RISC was the only way forward.

 

[TheRaptorJesus]

LTT sub has an automod to "correct" you if you mention anthony.

They also posted this on their community tab, someone must've gotten butt hurt by comments

 

[just Reading a post]

LTT sub has an automod to "correct" you if you mention anthony.

View attachment 6265346

They also posted this on their community tab, someone must've gotten butt hurt by comments

View attachment 6265360

Someone obviously ass blasted the shit out of Linus in the last video. He is probably going to have a whine about it on WAN show. But "take the joke away" from people like his known to do. That last video was jarring over the death in his family.

 

[GosuGopher]

Luke sitting there in silence while he sorts merch messages

As another sicko who still watches WAN show, I genuinely feel like Luke has very little interest in being a part of the podcast. He'll go through short periods where he is more engaged, but its rare (his excuse is usually being sick or tired).

imo neither him nor Linus should be curating merch messages or reading chat at all. Dan can either be a 3rd who either contributes when Linus/Luke don't seem to be grasping a topic or can just be there to feed merch messages or poll chat. Luke and Dan have some sort of professional grudge though, so I don't see that improving.

The woman they have producing the show is worthless, the black guy precursor to Dan was bad, the donation helper they have now doesn't seem to do anything, and the people writing the doc aren't incentivized to put effort in since neither Linus nor Luke read through it.
They'll repeat topics week-to-week and get major facts wrong constantly. This is exemplified by Linus' pet monkey Elijah hanging out in chat for free, and having a better grasp on the topics than Luke does 100% of the time, (50/50 compared to Linus).

If they were trying to generate interesting discussion like they used to, maybe it would matter less. But instead we get Linus talking to himself while Luke/Dan stare off into space or type the same glorified AI responses to the 1,000th person who mentioned being inspired to build computers by watching Linus' video about how to build computers.

Yet somehow worse are the asinine audience questions that actually get selected for the show, the same questions get asked every week and are all pointless retreads of the same 4 things:
* Asking basic questions about the 4 games Linus plays (Anno, Halo, FF6, and Beat Saber)
* Asking about the "early years" of LTT
* Asking about merch
* Asking for simple career advice

They also posted this on their community tab, someone must've gotten butt hurt by comments

I've been muted in the LTT comments a few times, Linus goes through and mutes at seemingly random when he is in a bad mood, 100s at a time.
If you keep posting *normal sounding* comments while shadowbanned, the channel moderators go through and will fairly reliably unmute your account.

 

[Kheapathic]

Yet somehow worse are the asinine audience questions that actually get selected for the show, the same questions get asked every week and are all pointless retreads of the same 4 things:
* Asking basic questions about the 4 games Linus plays (Anno, Halo, FF6, and Beat Saber)
* Asking about the "early years" of LTT
* Asking about merch
* Asking for simple career advice

Sounds like DarkSydePhil's podcast, complete with basic repetitive questions.

 

[Nabeshin]

macOS has little backwards comparability.

One of the things that made apple backwards compatibility good was that they baked some in hardware translation https://dougallj.wordpress.com/2022/11/09/why-is-rosetta-2-fast/ that helps with it.

But yeah, I agree with you but one thing that makes worse for windows is relying on a lot of old assembly on kernel source. So translating them aren't that easy, I'm a Linux fanboy and one of the things I love about POSIX is that it was made with the thought of portability in mind, so except for drivers and some API's(gpu and shit) they don't use assembly on it

 

[Nabeshin]

mobile platforms

You know that Apple mobile webm support is crap, right?

 

[Drama keen]

You know that Apple mobile webm support is crap, right?

Finder with QuickTime Player does not open WEBMs by default on MacOS, either. They just don't like the format, I guess?

 

[Dante Alighieri]

You know that Apple mobile webm support is crap, right?

Finder with QuickTime Player does not open WEBMs by default on MacOS, either. They just don't like the format, I guess?

Based Apple

 

[The Ugly One]

You know that Apple mobile webm support is crap, right?

Virtually all mobile devices are Arm now, not just Apple.