I don't understand how Linus has gotten over 900k views on every video in the past few months.
For better or for worse, he's managed to turn tech reviews into an entertainment product. Temporarily embarrassed tech enthusiasts who are totally just between sweet builds right now can tune in on a very regular schedule, and get something vaguely tech related talked into their ear for fifteen minutes while they eat their microwaved hot pockets and doomscroll linkedin, wondering if they should have gone for a software degree instead of business management. These people are too disconnected from the real tech space to really notice or care about the quality of the facts in the content, and are rarely actually making purchasing decisions based on this so don't really bounce off if they're fed fucked info.
Meanwhile, advertisers eat this up. Get enough broke wannabe tech enthusiasts mislead about your product lines, and statistically, some portion of them every year will stop being wannabe enthusiasts for any number of reasons, and will build a retard rig with big numbers and no use case. The sheer number of them LTT can address adds up to a significant market segment, and even if LTT has mislead them into buying bad or mismatched parts for a subpar rig, going from a craptop to
any kind of prosumer hardware is going to feel like a massive jump. They'll probably not even notice if they got fed an underROP'd 50 series card, bad memory, or a mobo with fucked chipsets, getting 50% performance out of a horrid build is still gonna be way better.
He drives casual interest, and he drives consumer behavior among the interested, and knows how to monetize both effectively. He's made sure his production team is playing the audience, not the ideals, which is why everything is on such a tight turnaround and very formulaic. Getting a video out within a week of it being relevant is far more important than getting the video right, because facts don't get views, regular content gets views.
With all the economic uncertainty, it will be interesting to see if the floor drops out within the next few years.
There's a lot of places he could see a crash out. The tariff situation is an interesting one that I can't really predict beyond "It'll be a rough few years" however it happens to shake out. The titans in the industry do have the money to brute force solutions and the financial incentive to do so as well, but whether they have the competency is a different story, nobody has really tried this kind of shift.
The other immediate and obvious place I see a potential crash out in is the Gaming Market itself, which makes up most of his prosumer audiences interests. We're seeing a lot of crashing and burning in the quality side of the industry, but we're specifically seeing a more or less complete failure to provide meaningful increases in product quality that are dependent on hardware. Multi-frame gen is ass but even if they clean it up, its to make games run acceptably that still look worse than older games that don't need it. Sure, if you freeze frame a 4k raw image, you might be able to catch fragments of detail more here and there, but for the most part its negligible. Worse, the actual meaningful increases in product quality come from gameplay, and most of that is coming from weak hardware optimized free to plays, and the indie space that rarely pushes next generation level graphical demands. Its becoming more and more viable to just sit on a card that's a couple years old, especially if you're not chasing 4k 240fps. Once a games gone through the launch window driver and performance bullshit, a card you bought in 2019 will still run new titles pretty well. And you can probably get 2-3 more years out of it, depending on when Microsoft decides to kick out that next generation box.
It'd just be a market cooldown, but if hardware refreshes for existing users decline, its gonna be harder for LTT to justify their huge sponsorship income. At the same time, if the general sentiment among the prosumer space becomes "Get hardware a couple years old, it'll make no difference" then the viewership on his new stuff will probably decline, and conversion in that space would crater harder.
He could survive it if he leans out, but that'd require him to eat a huge slice of humble pie, and I'm not sure he can do it without kicking off drama. He'd want to blame someone, either another media creator, or something in the industry, or even internal people, and that's gonna be a bad look atop all his others. And if his reaction to prior drama is any indication, it'll take his opportunity to change and improve, and turn it into him arrogantly planting his feet and refusing to do so on the 'principle of the matter' to prove his point.
