Linus Tech Tips has been ground zero for accusations of conflicts of interest, sloppy testing, and rushing out too much content too quickly to feed its ever-rising ambitions. Now the media empire valued at more than $100 million is on hiatus for a week as it reevaluates its internal practices.

Linus Tech Tips is one Youtube channel turned media company that covers PC gaming and the larger world of technology, which combines strong opinions with the feel of a bunch of geeks just messing around together. Think Mythbusters because if the latest rig off the shelf can play Cyberpunk 2077 on maximum settings.

Its problems began in late July. A Linus Tech Tips employee said in a video tour of its offices and test lab that one of the things that sets it apart from other content creators in the space like Gamers Nexus and Hardware Unboxed is that Linus Tech Tips tests everything from scratch every time it collects data for a new video.

“If you have to tell everyone how good your tests are, then in my 20+ years of experience, that means your tests aren’t very good,” Hardware Unboxed shot back in a tweet a few days later.

Gamers Nexus also ended up responding in a nearly 45-minute video posted on August 14, detailing a series of flaws that went beyond just the testing. Instead, it questioned a greater lack of quality and accuracy as an umbrella company Linus Media Group has ramped up production to release dozens of videos and weekly podcast episode to power the algorithmic content engine. In doing so, Gamers Nexus broke the dam for a much larger debate around the ethical responsibility and sustainability of creating content online and unleashed warring camps of fans between the rival tech-testing YouTube channels.

The Gamers Nexus video was requested a written response by Linus Sebastian, the company’s co-founder and current chief vision officer, prompting a rebuttal by Gamers Nexus in a second video. That then prompted Linus Tech Tips to release its own 22-minute Apology video on YouTube where several high-ranking employees and managers pledged to do better while reading from teleprompters.

“Effective immediately, all YouTube video production is on hiatus and our teams will spend all of next week focusing on long-term workflow changes to make our content better in a lasting way,” CFO Yvonne Ho said in the video. She and others vowed to use that time to review the company’s policies and best practices to prevent future mistakes.

Flaws revealed by Gamers Nexus

In its original video, Gamers Nexus showed a number of errors in some of Linus Tech Tips’ test data. Sometimes the mistakes were corrected afterwards with asterisks on the screen or updates pinned in the comment sections, but the videos were edited and never re-uploaded. In other cases, user error or confusion led to results that did not fairly represent the product being reviewed. The biggest example was a now infamous build test of a copper tube water cooler prototype made by Billet Labs. In a video Describing it as an overpriced waste, Sebastian fitted the cooler to a GPU it wasn’t properly fitted for and then blasted the poor performance. When criticized, he later defended himself in a podcast episode, saying it wasn’t worth the hundreds of dollars in employee time to retest it.

Things got even messier when Gamers Nexus alleged that Linus Tech Tips then sold the prototype instead of giving it back to Billet Labs so it could be sent out to other reviewers. Sebastian later clarified that it had not been sold, but rather auctioned off for charity during an Extra Life fundraiser for Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals. Linus Tech Tips eventually promised to reimburse Billet Labs for the cost despite originally agreeing to send back the entire test unit.

The broader takeaway from the Gamers Nexus video was that Linus Tech Tips was cutting corners to pump out more and more reviews and test videos, then getting defensive and obfuscating the truth when called out. Everyone makes mistakes, but it was the YouTube channel’s seeming rush to move past them and treat them as the price of growth that raised red flags. An edited summary of staff comments showed that many said they wished they had more time with each new video they produced.

At least one former employee has now claimed that the workload and the behavior of managers at the company caused her mental health to crater. YouTuber Madison Reeve, who worked as the Social Media Coordinator at Linus Tech Tips 2021, wrote a post a long Twitter thread on August 16 that painted a picture of a difficult and degrading work environment that included instances of alleged sexual harassment.

“My time at this company brought my mental health to an all-time low,” she wrote. “You could talk to anyone who was around me during my tenure and they would confirm that. I wouldn’t have recommended anyone I knew to work there, especially with my experiences as a woman in the office.”

Reeve and Linus Tech Tips did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

“I wasn’t built for this, and I’m tired,” Sebastian said in a June video announced that he was stepping down from the CEO role. “Like ‘really can’t do this anymore’ tired. And if I try to drag myself through another ten years of corporate finance, I know I’m going to destroy myself, and probably kill the company and the community that I love so much in the process.”

That role now belongs to Terren Tong, a former marketing director for Corsair Gaming. Tong bookended the Linus Tech Tips apology video by talking about his and the rest of the staff’s responsibility to maintain quality controls and ensure that sponsors do not interfere with the content. What neither he, nor anyone else in the video really addressed, was whether Linus Tech Tips can continue to grow at its current rate, or whether trying to keep scaling up on YouTube and other platforms is the ultimate source of recent sloppiness.

“We still screw up a lot and we have to own it fix it and move on, not be defensive and avoid blame,” Chief Technology Officer Luke Lafreniere said during the apology video. For his part, Sebastian now agrees that his refusal to test the Billet Labs monoblock cooler was a mistake. “I owe you better and I’m sorry,” he said.

Update 2023-08-16 13:11 ET: Clarified in the first paragraph that production has been stopped for a week.

Correction 2023-08-16 13:19 ET: The Clarifeid weekly video counter described in the fifth paragraph is owned by Linus Media Group as a whole and is updated to reflect only one podcast each week.