Name: When Your Audience Turns On You...
Uploaded: 2026-03-07T21:44:11.000Z
Duration: 13 min 38 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

In 2024, the biggest tech reviewer on YouTube launched his own app, and

within hours, his own audience turned on him.

Then the rest of YouTube was reviewing his app, $50 a year, ads, and

something much worse, and all of it for wallpapers.

If you're unfamiliar with Marcus Brownlee, AKA mkbhd, his tech videos pull in millions of views.

It all began in September 2024 in his annual iPhone review.

But this video started a bit differently.

If you've watched enough mkbhd, you know the aesthetic is basically half the video, and

It's hard to describe, but I'd call it a modern minimalist aesthetic.

Watching his videos sort of feels like being in an Apple Store, just with more color.

It's not for everyone, but for many, the aesthetic and visuals are the best parts of his videos.

So on the surface, a curated app filled with his wallpapers sounded great.

Artists were brought in to make work specifically for the platform, and they would get a 5050 split.

And the wallpapers themselves genuinely looked great.

The product made sense for his brand, gave something back to artists, and

answered a question his audience had been asking for.

You might have caught it on the top right of his pitch.

Now, to be fair, that was an annual subscription, but

if you wanted monthly, it was $11.99 a month or over $140 a year.

You can Google 4K wallpapers or go on Reddit to get infinite search results for free.

But even if you wanted to pay for premium art $12 per month.

For a bit of context, YouTube Premium is a similar $13.99 a month, which I think has much, much more value.

The cheapest Disney plus and Netflix plans are $11.99 and $7.99 a month.

Another wallpaper app, Wallpaperz, is just $3 a month and its images are in 8K instead of 4K.

$12 a month for wallpapers just felt absurd.

And fans agreed the backlash was immediate.

Ro got so used to being rich that he thinks everybody has $50 for a wallpaper app.

You either die a hero or live long enough to create panels.

I'd rather buy winrar than 50 bucks for a wallpaper.

I don't know about you, but I don't know anybody who's bought Winrar.

Which goes to show how bad all of this was.

This is where things probably should have ended though.

But little did Marcus know, this was just the beginning.

It turns out there was something much worse than the price.

But as it turns out, the reviews for his wallpaper app panels have not been terribly great.

Much of his audience is calling him out of touch because he is chargin dollars a year for it.

The backlash came rolling in and it was for much more than just the pricing.

The free tier might honestly have been worse than the $50 tier.

After finding a wallpaper I wanted, I had to watch an ad to unlock the standard definition and to unlock the full resolution.

Now some of these are pretty high quality where I can justify paying money for them.

And I have to watch 2 ads to unlock this one.

You only get standard definition aka 1920 by 1080 plus some parts of the app were just weird.

First of all, when you open the app it asks you to follow five creators.

I have no idea who these people are, so you just have to blindly pick five and hope that you picked hope that you picked good.

Memes began to spread and posts about Marcus charging $50 for the color orange.

This feels like Apple pricing logic though.

Some of these memes were pretty good, but it was clear he had misread the room.

The pricing wasn't even the full problem.

It was what users saw when they downloaded the app.

When you first opened the app, Apple gave you a pop up saying allow panels to track activity across other companies, apps and websites.

It happens when an app has advertising and wants to show curated ads.

But those who dug a little deeper saw that Panels had a pretty concerning privacy report card under data used to track you across other apps and websites.

It includes location identifiers, diagnostics and usage data.

Expensive subscription, unskippable ads, aggressive data collection.

People's disappointment and frustration kept brewing and the whole thing was quite ironic.

Back in 2016, Marcus tweeted golden rule number one of the Internet never try to charge for something that was already free.

Eventually, the backlash, the pressure and the discourse was too much.

First thing we're doing is fixing the excessive data disclosures as people rightfully brought up as Far as pricing, I hear you.

It's our own personal challenge to work to deliver that kind of value.

For the premium version, the replies were about what you'd expect.

Then a few weeks later, he made a whole video.

Last week I launched a project that I was really excited about that we've been working on for a while, a wallpaper app called Panels.

And I made a lot of mistakes along the way, including the fact that I didn't really explain anything.

I didn't explain the ui, what was in it, the point of the app, and

most importantly, why it had a friggin $50 price tier.

And so appropriately, the entire Internet was very disappointed.

Even though subscriptions are incredibly unpopular, we wanted to at least offer one that made sense for the wallpaper power user, for how few of you actually exist.

So first of all, we have a new tier that is two bucks a month, which is everything I just mentioned, completely ad free and full resolution, everything across the board.

So that means you never have to see another ad, never have to worry about that, and

you always get the highest resolution version, no matter what screen you're downloading for.

I think this is really fair and should hopefully continue to help pay to keep the app running as well.

The price change is honestly great for the privacy concerns, Marcus said.

It was apparently based on the app's ad service, AdMob, and

just to be safe, we just checked way too many boxes.

You can also use the app without making an account, but

daringfireball.net pointed out that Panels didn't actually use your GPS location, just your IP address, which Apple still classifies as location.