Marques Brownlee and Walt Mossberg on Trustworthy Tech Reviews
Despite being two of the most influential tech reviewers ever, Walt Mossberg and Marques Brownlee (aka MKBHD) had somehow never met — at least before appearing on the latest episode of On With Kara Swisher. In the resulting group chat, Kara gets them to compare and contrast their experiences, a generation apart, and weigh in on everything from AI gadgets to the Cybertruck. In the two segments excerpted below, the trio dives into how to handle pushback, the problems with paid content, and what matters most when it comes to earning and keeping people’s trust.
Kara Swisher: So, this is a lede to a Wired Magazine profile of Walt in 2004: “Walt Mossberg is walking through the convention hall at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas when a man starts screaming at him.” This man was Hugh Panero, the CEO of XM Satellite Radio, which is now SiriusXM, and he blamed you, Walt, for their falling stock price and a sudden plunge in consumer interest. Walt, you yelled back, “I don’t give a fuck about your stock price,” which is the platonic deal of a tech reviewer. Talk about what challenges you faced when you tried to live up to that ideal, besides being yelled at by tech CEOs at CES.
Walt Mossberg: Well, I started my column in 1991, which was not the birth of the mass market personal computer, but it was roughly the moment when it began to spread in a big way to consumers. And my column was different than all the other columns that were out there at the time because I spoke in plain English, refused to use jargon. To this day, I don’t think I ever, I mean I wrote thousands of columns, I don’t think I ever used the word milliamp, and the second way was I just focused clearly on quality, ease of use, utility for the consumer.
And I don’t think in any of those columns, the word stock appears, the word market cap appears, the word earnings appear, none of those words appear. It’s all product and it’s all consumer, and it’s all about that. And so, when I started, the challenges were, first of all, there were internal challenges. Believe it or not, there was a significant amount of opinion among some of the editors that technology wasn’t important enough to devote a column to. I’d been there 20 years covering Washington policy and all that, so they knew who I was, but they didn’t think technology mattered. So, that was the first thing.
The top editor at the time, as the one who pushed it through and it became very popular very quickly, but the editors didn’t see it. And then, the companies went crazy. One of the earliest columns I wrote, and you know all about this Kara, was I said AOL was the online service of the future. It was the one you should all join. “Don’t bother with Prodigy. Don’t bother with CompuServe,” which were the leaders at the time. And the head of Prodigy apparently appeared at the Journal offices like a week later and demanded I be fired.
Swisher: Wow. So, you had pushback from companies and stuff?
Mossberg: Oh, there was a lot of pushback, which I didn’t pay any attention to it.
Swisher: Marques, 10 years after that profile, Wired Magazine called you a YouTube sensation and suggest that you may become a media mogul. And now, you kind of are one. As Mr. Beast has said, “You’re a video producer that decides what everyone in America buys.” What challenges do you run into as the premier reviewer of tech these days? There’s tons of reviewers. A lot of people have opinions. The power of reviewers has declined significantly, not just in tech, but movies and everywhere else.
Marques Brownlee: Yeah, probably the most interesting part since it is YouTube that we’re talking about is there are a ton of voices now. Anyone can review anything they have, but I think the challenge is when a phone comes out, for example, I mean there could be 50, 100 videos that day all about that device reviewing it. And so, you have to give people a good reason to watch yours. Instead of just reviewing it like anyone else, you need this additional extra, whether it’s production or entertainment value or something, to give people a reason to look at your thing. So, that feels like a little extra challenge on top of just the regular review part of trying to be honest about a product.
Swisher: And you also operate under a different financial incentives. Walt and I eventually started our own thing, and even then, text is different than video, as you talked about. Talk about how creating content on YouTube affects the way you review products because you do it a very similar way to Walt did, which is reporting is what I would call it. It’s hard. Would you approach the job differently if you’re writing tech reviews independently, say on Substack, for example? Which I don’t think there’s a big tech reviewer on Substack that I can think of off the top of my head. But how is that different? Because at the heart you have to be accurate and do actual reporting rather than do an ad for people or whatever. What a lot of tech reviews have degenerated into, ads essentially.
Brownlee: Yeah. I think what you’ll notice a lot of people point out is on YouTube specifically, you’re incentivized to package your video in a way that is very clickable because you want it to translate. You want the impressions to turn into views, you want people to click on your thing. So, I talked about this in a recent video, but basically, there is the part where you’re reviewing a product and trying to be fair and honest and informative for the person watching. But then the other half for people making videos online is, how do you package it? And I think if I was writing for Substack, or writing for a newspaper, or a blog, you can package it in all these different ways. And I think people maybe either ignore or aren’t as familiar with YouTube packaging in a way that clearly translates to clicks while still being honest. So, yeah, those are, as you point out, two different challenges that come with the same job, but we try to blend them together as best we can.
Swisher: So when you put those sensational titles, and I think you’ve been criticized for that, is that a problem? Because the reviews are very different, but do you have to do that and make it seem like, “Look over here,” that kind of thing? Does it change the nature of reviewing?
Brownlee: No, I think we spend a lot of time debating… I have a small team and we talk about titles all the time and try to figure out, what is the best title that kind of has a bunch of different jobs? It needs to summarize the video or the sentiment of the video, but not give away too much. But it also needs to create intrigue, so that you actually do want to watch the video. But it also needs to be somewhat unique in a way that… Because let’s say a new phone comes out, for example, I could just call it Samsung Galaxy S24 review, and that’s it. No effort, headline works for the video, but there could be some common thread that I’ve strung through the entire video that is the theme or the motif of the video that could be an appendage to that title. That kind of helps you stay paying attention for the whole video. So, there’s all kinds of methods that we have for coming up with titles like that. So, it’s kind of more of a science than anything. There are just-
Swisher: But you don’t find it sensational, is what I’m saying?
Brownlee: No, and that’s one of the things we try not to do. If you over promise and under-deliver, if you’re sensational or something like that, people will watch the video and find it not to represent what you’re actually saying, and they’ll leave. And YouTube analytics will reflect that, and then you’re punished for that, so that doesn’t work.
Swisher: Walt, you talked about the evolution of the tech review. What’s gone through your head as you’ve watched power and consumer tech reviews shift from reporters working at legacy media outlets, like you did, and to writers at blogs and digital media companies, to eventually content creators at YouTube, and so many of them, and so many of them? And I know when you started, there were a lot of tech fanboys that were writing reviews, as I recall, and you were not one of those.
Mossberg: Right, I mean, I was accused of it, but I was not. Most general purpose publications, magazines, newspapers, eventually early crude websites had reviewers, but I would break them down into two camps. One was fanboys. So, if you were an Apple fanboy, everything Apple did was perfect. There were Blackberry fanboys in those days. There were WordPerfect fanboys, Marques — WordPerfect.
Brownlee: Yeah.
Swisher: We didn’t hang with them.
Mossberg: There were Lotus — there were Microsoft — this is hard to believe, but there were Microsoft fanboys. Not that many, but there were some. So, that was one camp. The other camp was just people not necessarily trying to be a fanboy, but people who were geeks writing for geeks and completely ignoring at mainstream people. Those were the two big camps. And then, there was me and maybe one or two others who tried to write for the general public. And I was lucky because I could stick to my guns on anything. And you know this Kara, but in those days, I don’t know about today, but in those days, the Journal would stand by you. And nobody, and I mean nobody, not even when Murdoch bought our company, nobody screwed around with my conclusions or anything. I had veto power over the headlines.
And in a small way, they were a little bit like what Marques was describing with his titles of his reviews. Because even in the really old days, a headline was meant kind of a little bit like clickbait. It was meant to get you to read the thing. But the Wall Street Journal headlines, most of them were boring, and most of the ones on my columns were boring. They hired a cartoonist when I started, who was with me for a few years, who wrote little funny cartoon figures with the columns as another way of drawing people in.
Swisher: Marques, it seems like a tempest in a teapot from the outside, but in a nutshell, you published a review of the Humane Pin, which I’m going to ask about later for both of you. That was titled, “The Worst Product I’ve Ever Reviewed… For Now.” Some people objected, one viral post said your YouTube title was, “distasteful, almost unethical.” And that, “Potentially killing someone else’s nascent project reeks of carelessness.” I know what Walt’s going to say, but you responded with a video titled, “Do Bad Reviews Kill Companies?”
So, anyone who wants to hear you go deep, they can watch that video. My question is: why do people who have no skin in the game get so upset by your reviews? Humane’s Head of New Media said your review was honest and solid. Meanwhile, the people who wrote the viral review criticizing you doesn’t work for Humane. And they were like, “You shouldn’t hurt companies that are trying things.” I think that’s ridiculous, but talk to me about that.
Brownlee: Yeah, it’s a really interesting question. I do feel like a lot of the times you see a response like that, you click on their bio and you’re like, “Oh, you’re invested in the company,” or, “Oh, you work for the company,” or something like that. And I guess the only other version of that I’ve seen is when someone has a persona or a theme that they have to stick to where they’re like, “I am the optimist about tech. And tech can only be good, and so if anything says tech is bad, I have to defend it.” And that’s kind of the other bubble that I guess some people —
Swisher: Yes, I know them well.
Brownlee: Yeah, the lens that people look at everything from. So, I try to take constructive criticism, obviously with anything that we make, but obviously we considered the title and all of the things that went into the Humane Pin review very thoroughly. It’s a new form factor, it was very interesting product to us. So, the review, a lot of work went into it. But yeah, I feel like for the most part, people agreed with the way we framed it, the way we analyzed the product, the conclusions that we came to, which by the way, it is still the worst product I’ve ever reviewed, but that’s still a for now thing because of the state of these products. They’re supposed to get so much better, so we’ll keep an eye on it, but yeah.
Swisher: I assume most people who consume your reviews aren’t actually researching a product. They’re considering buying. They just want to be entertained and informed and know things. As someone commented in one of your videos, Marques, “I would buy this if I wasn’t broke. To be honest, for me, this channel is just 99% window shopping. Love you, Marques.” That sums it up. The audience trusts you, enjoys your work and wants to go on an aspirational ride with you even if they’re never going to buy the thing you’re reviewing.
Walt, I think the same with you. People really trusted you. If you said to buy it, they trusted you to buy it. I’d like each of you to talk about that. Innumerable people are like, “Walt didn’t like it. I’m not going to do it.” It’s sort of like a restaurant review or something like that. But they had an implicit trust in you. Marques, first, you talk about trust, and then Walt, because I think, Walt, probably you were the most trusted reporter at the Wall Street Journal in a strange way, if you think about it. Go ahead, Marques.
Brownlee: Yeah. Okay, so what you were just talking about with people who watch the videos but don’t buy it, I very distinctly think of my audience as two different buckets of people. One of them being people who are just watching videos for entertainment and to learn about something, whatever, they’re not going to buy something. But then the other is people who are actively searching to go decide what they’re going to buy. So similar to the Journal, not everyone who reads it is actually thinking about going to buy a new phone, but those who are also going to go look for opinions on the new phone. So I’m trying to talk to both of those groups of people in every review that I do.
As far as trust, I think that just comes with telling a truth for a long time consistently. I don’t think there’s much more to that. I think people see that if you’re truthful about things that are good and things that are bad and sort of are able to back it up and do that for a long period of time, then that can only generate trust. And I think some people lose the trust with their audience when they sort of bend to that a little bit. If they sugarcoat something because they don’t want to be too mean or they’re friends with a company so they don’t want to say too many hurtful things, then you start to not tell the truth as much and lose that trust. So the trust just comes from being consistently honest.
Swisher: What about you, Walt?
Mossberg: Yeah, I would say that that’s the same. I mean, there were people who read my column, particularly in the days when it was in the Wall Street Journal, which is a very particular kind of publication. There were people who read it because they wanted to know what stocks to buy, even though I never ever, ever gave investment advice or they just wanted to keep up with tech. And so I had these new products, and so they want to know what was the new product. But then like Marques says, there were lots of people who made buy, no-buy decisions based on reviews, and particularly my reviews. I mean, this is one reason that I was influential.
Swisher: For each episode, we ask an expert to send a question. And for this one, we got Joanna Stern, the senior personal technology columnist at the Wall Street Journal.
Mossberg: Great.
Swisher: Here’s her question for both of you:
Joanna Stern: Hi, guys. You both have been an inspiration to me, Walt, a decade ago, I took over your personal tech column at the Wall Street Journal. And every week since, I’ve tried to uphold what you’ve built. Marques, you motivated me to make sure video was key to it all. But something big has changed over the last decade. Mainstream media outlets went balls to the wall with affiliate links and wire cutter-like sites. Then “creator reviews”, yes, I’m doing air quotes, flood social media and YouTube with every major product launch. Problem is, neither creators nor platforms are great at flagging paid content. And with AI, it only looks to get worse. So the question, going forward, how are people going to know who to trust for tech buying decisions? And what’s the business model to make sure the trust remains?
Swisher: Marques, why don’t you start with that? Because this is absolutely true, the paid content is getting more and more confusing, right?
Brownlee: Yeah.
Swisher: And they probably assume you did. I know once in a while, everyone was like, “Oh, Walt’s paid for that.” I’m like, “What are you talking about?”
Mossberg: Oh, a lot. They used to say that. Yeah.
Swisher: Talk a little bit about that.
Brownlee: Yeah. Thanks, Joanna. I think that is for sure something to consider. I think honestly as far as knowing who to trust, that’s still going to come from this very human thing of what is your track record of being trustworthy? Just a basic like, “How long have you been doing this the way I expect someone I trust to be doing this?”
And the other half of this, and I wish I could do some sort of journalistic sidebar where you can just see all my ethics next to every video, but I don’t necessarily have that ability, but I’ve done a video, “Can you trust Marques Brownlee?”, where I talked about exactly, “Here is what I disclose. Here’s what I have to disclose legally. Here is how I handle ads. Here is everything laid out in front of you so you know that from the get-go.” So when you watch videos and people don’t disclose and you notice that, or when people have a bunch of affiliate links and have said, “Well, you really should buy this one,” and it looks kind of weird, that stuff erodes trust. Even if it’s just a person talking to a person, that erodes trust. So yeah, I kind of feel like you just treat it like a person to a person. I was just talking in a GroupMe bunch of messages — GroupMe: terrible app —
Swisher: I know.
Brownlee: But a frisbee team I play for uses it to talk to each other, and they were all talking about this certain product, whether they should buy it or not. And I am just chiming in as someone who just happens to have the product and use it. And that’s just how it sort of feels on the Internet. Like, “Oh, I have one actually, it’s pretty good. Here’s what I liked about it.” And that’s the sort of thing, people, that’s what trust looks like.
Swisher: Yeah. What about you, Walt? From Joanna.
Mossberg: Well, thank you. Joanna, same thing. Look, there are reviews and there are descriptions. When Apple or any company brings out something new, Google brings out something new, I know that Marques and Joanna and other honest reviewers will say, “This is a first look. This is not a review. I will have my review shortly.” So this is not a review, but on first impressions, whatever, the OLED screen looks good, or don’t buy this version of the OLED screen, whatever. But there are 10,000 people on YouTube for whom there’s no difference between the review and the first look.
They spend an hour or less with something and they publish what they call, they use the word review. So when I see that, I immediately don’t trust it. Secondly, affiliate links are, I understand it’s very tough to make money, but I think an affiliate link is an ethical problem. I’m sure there are ways to build walls, but it just looks like an ethical problem to me. You and I, Kara, we wrote ethics statements. We designed our Recode website —
Swisher: In 2007.
Mossberg: And our AllThingsD website to have ethics statements right next to the byline of every reporter.
Swisher: Right, which was unusual at the time.
Mossberg: Which was highly unusual. And to my knowledge, nobody’s copied it, but if you wanted to know the financial, first of all, you weren’t allowed to hold any stock in any of these companies whose products you reviewed. I don’t believe that to be true of all these creators who are reviewers. I’m sure it’s true of you. I have no doubt, Marques, but I don’t think it’s true of a lot of people trying to compete with you. So, I look at a lot of these people, and I have various clues that tell me this is not legit. I don’t know if the average person has those clues. And so, that’s tough.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
On With Kara Swisher is produced by Nayeema Raza, Blakeney Schick, Cristian Castro Rossel, and Megan Burney, with mixing by Fernando Arruda, engineering by Christopher Shurtleff, and theme music by Trackademics. New episodes will drop every Monday and Thursday. Follow the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.