Marques Brownlee says ‘I hear you’ after fans criticize his new wallpaper app

AnActOfCreation@programming.dev to Technology@lemmy.world – 314 points – Marques Brownlee says ‘I hear you’ after fans criticize his new wallpaper app
theverge.com

Marques Brownlee, known as MKBHD, faced backlash over his new wallpaper app, Panels, due to its high subscription cost ($49.99/year) and concerns over excessive data permissions.

Brownlee acknowledged user feedback, promising to adjust ad frequency for free users and address privacy concerns, clarifying that the app's data disclosures were broader than intended.

The app, which offers curated wallpapers and shares profits with artists, aims to improve over time, despite criticisms of its design and monetization approach.

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Apparently one of the wallpapers is just solid orange. It's called "Orange", is labeled as "abstract", and is labeled with a copyright.

It's a solid orange rectangle.

The artist spent a lot of time on that!

Months to get that perfect shade of orange.

And just the effort of painting every one of those pixels one by one, it's not like we have some magic tool to fill an image with the same color and call it a day.

Perhaps more likely years of work with colour and colour theory preceding a quick output of some content? Why the sarcastic tone?

The sarcastic tone is likely because of the price. There is something jarring about such a simple product, even if it was made by an artist with a good eye for color, being behind such a large paywall. Most people find this app, even forgetting "Orange," to be overpriced, myself included. It should be expected for people to use the most extreme examples to point out the absurdity and to laugh at it, especially when it's being marketed to the public.

Had this been an app you buy for $10 once, still there would be people like this, but much less. And if it were free, for example, nobody would bat an eye. The outrage is caused by price.

I'm not invested in this debacle at all, really. I just found your lack of understanding interesting. Not trying to offend you by that.

Sure. I definitely do not disagree about the price but I wish you’d made it about that and not the art. Have a good Friday!

That is a measure of exactly nothing.

https://www.nme.com/photos/30-minutes-or-less-19-famous-songs-written-at-staggering-speed-1422651

Your post makes it very clear that you have little experience in the creative world. There is no linear measure of successs or quality. You do a great disservice to those toiling with their creativity by making comments such as this one. We need artists, they are fragile things and should be treated with care.

I didn’t start this post planning to get hetup but I do feel that taking umbrage to your comment is fair, if not tautological.

I would encourage you to labour over a still life or wrestle a passable rendition of your favourite guitar riff. Try sing the first phrase of your favourite song in key. Trust me: none of those things are easy.

If you don’t like “Orange” then just look at something else and hold your tongue.

I feel this is going to be an unpopular opinion, but if you want unique wallpapers, consider paying an actual artist, instead of an influencer

If I want a unique wallpaper I go on a walk in the great outdoors and take a picture

most unique things outdoors are photographed already

So it makes sense to spend $50 a year on some pictures of those things that are already photographed?

I'm not sure how many times the things you're taking a picture of has been photographed matters even slightly.

So? Photography is fun. My photos don't exist until I take them.

Sounds pretty reasonable to me. Avoid sites like Fiver, though. Lots of AI bullshit pretending to be real art.

Even before the flood of AI bullshit Fiverr really, really sucked for the human artists, creatives, coders, and other freelancers employed through the platform.

I made a Fiverr account once for my art services. I deleted it within an hour of creation after reading how much money they would steal from my commissions.

I don't think that's going to be an unpopular opinion around here. Maybe a little tricky in the logistics of distinguishing between an artist and influencer and finding an artist who you like and can pay for a phone background, but other than that you're not going to find many Lemmings saying "no, pay an influencer!"

No sane individual is going to pay for a subscription for phone backgrounds.

That is absolutely a stupid business idea and the people who came up with it should be publicly shamed.

You think it's new? It's have already done by so many people in Android community. Like Widepaper, Wallfever, Wallbyte etc. These all apps are paid. People actually pay for Wallpapers.

I think buying an app for a couple of quid that has a good curated collection of wallpapers, a nice UX, etc. is a completely fair price to pay for the convenience. I like supporting devs. I fail to see the stupidity.

A $12 monthly subscription is an entirely different beast, though.

Or even a market that let you just buy individual wallpapers as you want them, like how you used to be able to buy individual tracks in itunes instead of a whole album.

A subscription model is a bit silly.

I've not looked into it, but it's probably pitched as a feel-good way of supporting artists.

Remember when people paid for ringtones? Doesn't mean it isn't stupid, especially as a subscription, but people do stupid things and other people take advantage.

And Ringback tones too. For when people called you, so they could listen to your favorite song instead of the ring of the phone while waiting for you to pick up.

I forgot about that! And most songs sound like ass when you hear it over a phone, especially before whatever they did in the last decade to make voice calls more clear

Back in the day people paid for ringtones, wallpapers, etc. Dumbest thing ever were 'ringbacks' where you paid to have a song or something play when people called you. So the people buying it didn't even hear it, they just forced other people to listen to a shitty low fidelity garbled mess of a song they liked while you waited for them to pick up the phone.

$50 a year for wallpapers or I could go to wallhaven and get millions for free?

The "shares its profits with the artists" part is relevant here.

It would almost be cheaper to commission an artist frankly.

Almost is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence.

Nah it'd be cheaper to commission the artist for a dozen or so pictures for 45 bucks:

First you need to blow some ungodly amount of money on breaking the time/space barrier.... Then travel back to the 1920s and find a starving artist. Then pitch him 45 bucks for some art. Easy! 45 bucks to them is like 800 of our today dollars.

Sarcasm aside- it seems people really are disconnected on how much a commission or art costs. Sure you can buy prints reasonably priced but any commission that isn't a speedy doodle is going to clock in a helluva lot higher.

For a single piece sure.

I presume the idea here is that you have access to their full library. Personally, I fail to see why I would change my wallpaper enough to warrant even a free app to change it, let alone 50 bucks.

If you know an artist doing commissions that cheap they are depressed, desperate, or want to fuck you.

Could just commission someone on Fiverr for an original artwork

One piece digitally drawn in an hour or two maybe. Otherwise it is likely premade, generated, or not their source. Yeah- if you are talking backgrounds for a phone they could be more abstract or start with a base but for 45 bucks? That buys you an hour or two of that artists time- three if they like the idea or you.

Just use a free wallpaper app and pay a random artist 25 bucks

Did he disclose an amount?

5% to artists is very different than 40% to artists.

Or is he adopting the Spotify bottom line?

Only pay artists after X downloads and only pay a few cents after thousands of downloads and use the rest for profits

It's 50%, which is honestly quite low

50% is quite decent and is 20% higher than most other "decent" services including physical stores. Building and keeping an app up to date with ever changing content requires at least a part time developer which is expensive.

Well the baseline is that most wallpaper apps, which don't pay artists afaik, charge like $5 a year, so if you're gonna charge me 50, I expect 90% to go to artists

I’m an artist who has uploaded many of my works to wallhaven entirely for free online, alongside the games I put out and any other creative venture I’ve pursued over the years.

That part is problematic not relevant.

digitalblasphemy.com ftw

The wallpapers are nice but the website is hideous and unusable.

Edit: typo

the website is hideous and unusable

huh?

screenshot of digitalblasphemy.com viewed on mobile, a simple grid of thumbnails on a black background

Used it on desktop, had to create account, even after that kept giving me errors that i need an account...

It costs $49.99 per year (or $11.99 per month)

Why in the hell does the monthly price end with you paying 280% more than the yearly. That is such an absurd discount I don't even know why someone would pay at all for this app but more so I want to understand where the price justification is and who came up with this plan.

To be clear I support artists and more than welcome a platform for them to share and sell art if they wish... I don't get why it needs to be a subscription service and I don't see how such inflated charges are going to help artists as it'll just discourage large numbers of people wanting to support them.

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/the-decision-lab/201109/product-pricing-and-framing-when-are-we-likely-pay-more

Short version: there’s an $80 bread maker with 5 features, a $120 bread maker with 12 features, and a $475 bread maker with 14 features.

The $475 bread maker only exists to make the $120 version look like a bargain.

Also the nature of a wallpaper app, maybe you just want to plop in get a wallpaper and scamper off into the sunset.

Matter of fact for the $50 a year price I could sign back up for a month twice a year and still come out on top.

I believe this is called the anchoring effect in psychology, and it's really effective

But in the end you get more feature for a higher price. In this case it's the same app for different prices depending on time frame... not to mention the app has no purpose beyond finding a wallpaper so it only really has 1 feature.

The point is not whether there are more features. The point is to give you an incentive to go yearly, and in this case it’s a huge “discount” even though it’s in no way worth the monthly cost. The monthly plan isn’t meant to sell you the monthly plan. It’s meant to make the yearly plan look good.

I want to understand where the price justification is

The justification is that people should be yearly subscribers when they can more easily forget to cancel it.

Probably because you can pay for a month and download all the wallpapers and cancel.

Who would pay for this?

Marques has a decent chunk of his fan base that's...kinda rich? That's the only thing that can explain why he reviews supercars and expects people to use their phone without a case. So if he's directing some of that fan base's money toward artists, I'm all for it, assuming the profit sharing is reasonable (and I have no reason to believe it's not).

I mean, I'm not going to pay that sort of money on a wallpaper (I almost always use photos of family or friends anyway). But if the people who buy it like it, and the people who sell art for it are treated well, you go MKBHD.

I use my phone without a case too, phones don't break that easily. I even dropped it on stone tiles once when I missed my pocket and it only got a few scratches on the side from that.

There are a lot of people walking around with cracked screens who would seem to disagree.

Skill issue on their part

Maybe they can't pay for screen repairs, still care to call it a skill issue?

That was a joke, whether or not your phone screen cracks it obviously not a skill issue

If what others have said about there being a solid orange wallpaper, I have questions about the art

Im not rich and I use my phone without a case and watch some of those reviews.

The app is a bad idea with a bad deal for artists.

Im not rich and I use my phone without a case

I guess you could also have fairly sticky hands.

and watch some of those reviews.

Yeah, sometimes I do too, if only for the novelty of it. But they're certainly not for us.

The app is a bad idea with a bad deal for artists.

Citation needed. Do you have any data on the app's profit share structure? Because at the price they're charging, if they're passing on a decent share of it to the artists, it sounds like it's not a bad gig.

Fifty fifty is what MKB said was the split, which is a predatory figure. Apple charges less and people are up in arms about their predatory practices.

I dont know what the sticky hands comment means.

I dont know what the sticky hands comment means.

I'm not brave enough to use my phone without a case, because I know I'll drop it. Either you're braver than me, richer than me, or you have better grip than me.

Fifty fifty is what MKB said was the split, which is a predatory figure.

50% of the revenue or 50% of the profit? Because if they're paying the artists first and footing the bill for hosting the app out of the other 50%, that's a pretty good deal.

I just dont like cases and take the risk. Phones are nicer looking without.

He didnt specify which would lead me to believe profits. Neither is a good split, he is charging as much as spotify for content he did not create and keeping half.

I just dont like cases and take the risk. Phones are nicer looking without.

No doubt, but I don't have that kind of cash to burn on the aesthetics.

Neither is a good split, he is charging as much as spotify for content he did not create and keeping half.

Hosting and maintaining an application actually has some pretty non-trivial cost associated with it. If it's half of revenue, then MKBHD actually isn't taking very much at all.

Marques Brownlee: "Don't pay for what something will be, pay for what it is now" and "I don't review what will be, but what a product is now"

Also Marques Brownlee: "Pay the subscription fee now for the unnamed unspecified features this will have other than just wallpapers now to fund future development"

Who knew the next company he would "kill" would be his own. The only way to find his app on Android is to use the link from his site because of the generic name.

BTW Wallpaper Engine, which has an android app, is currently $5 Canadian, and I am told with Proton can also work on Linux PC's and has an huge amount of modifiable wallpapers.

I don’t think that’s what he’s saying. You have to ask yourself a question: is offering an expensive upfront subscription for an evolving product an endorsement of assessing future value into your purchase. In my view, it isn’t and it’s not what he’s saying.

What he is saying is that to the minority who will find this a good value or who are okay donating to help them implement new features, go ahead and hit that button. Then separately he’s saying “the price will make more sense to more people as features are added” which is true but is not an endorsement of paying the current price for those promised features. At least from what’s in the article and what I’ve seen.

It’s the difference between saying that you should buy Minecraft because it will become an awesome game one day versus saying you should buy Minecraft because it’s either worth it to you now or you’re okay with helping to fund the development of future features you’ll receive. Those are very different.

Minecraft was already awesome when I purchased it in 2011, I didn't have to get promised vague future features.

I agree. But that’s a subjective stance obviously. I think since Minecraft was priced appropriately for its current value, there was no need to consider future value increasing. And on that basis they could have sold the game for more and chose not to. Still the point is that even if most people didn’t consider it, it incentivizes early purchases. If it were priced at the 1.0 build price at alpha launch, only die hard supporters would have bought it. Everyone else would wait. Same thing here.

Also Minecraft is a good example of why his argument is shit as that started off at a low price and increased as it became more complete

You’ve just showed me why my point works. If you buy in now, your early purchase of Minecraft becomes more valuable over time as stuff is added. Therefore, buying now is better than buying later.

Whereas with his app, it’s overpriced now and will add features until that value proposition is met for more people. That discourages you from buying it and there’s no reason to buy it. Especially since it’s a subscription.

Now could he have done the Minecraft model? Yes. And since it’s a subscription, the price can go up slowly with no benefit to early adopters. I think the main reason he didn’t do that is because changing pricing this way generally doesn’t go well.

Regarding Wallpaper Engine on KDE Plasma, since I switched to Linux a few days ago: here is the repo for the one KDE Wallpaper Plugin i found that worked fine on Nobara. Subscribe to the Wallpapers in Steam, point the plugin to the steam library, done. just know that there are some wallpapers not working yet, which makes plasmashell crash, but no biggie, change the wallpaper and restart plasmashell again.

Wallpapers on phone are useless because apps are always full screen.

Who would pay for such thing?

This guy is no different than every other smarmy "Tech Reviewer" on YT. His reviews have been borderline useless for the last few years. This is just the next logical step that these guys take - hitch themselves onto a tech accessory or app and charge their followers predatory prices - fuck this guy.

It's kind of a paradox when you think about it. Good reviewers are often just regular people with a passion for tech but as they become more popular and prolific they become part of the industry itself. Once that happens even if they try to stay objective and critical their perspective is so different from regular people that reviews are just part of the sales and marketing strategy rather than pro tips from an enthusiast.

Yeah, I imagine him getting shipped products over and over and then likely being paid to try them out and then paid to review them would dampen the authenticity. That said, I haven't watched much of his content so I couldn't tell you if he really was really bias or changed over time.

He's on the better side of tech reviewers IMO. I think sometimes he's more focussed on describing what sets a product apart in the market, rather than judging whether that niche is worth filling or not.

Definitely doesn't feel scammy/overly ad driven.

Paying for ANY wallpaper is just silly, much less a subscription model.

The only time you should pay for one if it’s an artist you want to actively support and/or thank for that specific work.

For the last 30 years, they've been trying to charge for dumb shit like wallpapers, screen savers, mouse cursors.

Who are these people who buy them? And what's wrong with you?

When toy story came out, i saw this toy story pc game. I put all my money together just to then find out that it wasn't a game, it was a cd rom with like 12 wallpapers on it.

ringtones baby

I still have PTSD from the era of the ‘polyphonic ringtone’ hype. Those were the ‘fancier’ ringtones that weren’t just your usual beep or bell.

Usually you’d buy them by sending a text message to some expensive number and it would be sent to your phone. If you were dumb, you could get basically scammed into a ‘subscription’ so you’d get sent these expensive ringtones frequently. Many a teen got yelled at for that mistake in the late 90’s.

If you were a tech savvy lad, you could hook your phone up to your Windows PC and upload shitty ringtones yourself as well as wallpapers and such.

These days, who gives a shit? My iPhone ringtone is still the default ring. I honestly don’t care what it is, as it’s usually just annoying anyway.

Yeah, that was a cash cow for a few years and now everybody has their phone on vibrate.

I remember watching the rich kid in middle school buy a ring tone right in front of me, flexing that his device could play a 12-second loop of Tubthumping by Chumbawamba.

Yeah, that rich kid Danny. He plays the songs that remind him of the good times and sings the songs that remind him of the better times. Oh Danny Boy, Danny Boy, Danny Boy

I agree, although i DID spend 5€ on wallpaper engine and i am very happy with it. (just know that our chinese friends are using the steam workshop for WPE to upload/download porn because most porn sites are great-firewalled lol, so take care regarding your filter settings)

I actually do have WPE… it was in a bundle one time, so I got it for free. Tried it once, but I’m conceptually not a fan of running extra software on my gaming PC to run fancy wallpapers.

Supposedly it’s not TOO power hungry and can turn itself off when gaming. How’s your experience been with that?

I'm currently running 2 displays at 1080p (one HDMI, one DP) on a 3070TI. Idle TDP with just plain color is 37-40W, 2 different scenes with features like audio reactivity and mouse input @15FPS are 55-60W. They get paused automatically when a window is maximized (per display), the secondary display pauses additionally when i run a fullscreen/borderless window on the main display.

It is absolutely useless eye candy. I love it lol

ETA: They DO have over 15000 curated wallpapers, if you stick to that you can avoid the questionable content easily. if you look at it from this perspective, that's worth the price of a small meal.

Can people no longer upload a JPG to their phones? What am I missing here?

It sounds like it's a way to get high quality original art / photos for use as backgrounds and support the people making them too.

Everyone that buys this garbage deserves to lose their money.

"I hear you"

Corporate PR phrase detected. Product mentally blacklisted

50/50 cut is borderline predatory. It should be 30/70. It feels like marques is so out of touch with common people.

30% is still predatory imo. Especially for a glorified marketplace with an image delivery system.

He is fronting money for development. Which is not cheap.

Once dev cost stabilizes, I would love to have a better split for artists.

Dev cost is less than you'd think. And lowering costs when you make an app that's meant to generate money for you? That will never happen.

Spoken like a true non-developer.

It is probably just a web view, lol

I started to get worked up but then i remembered I don't particularly care. He's in it to make bank, not necessarily sell you a quality product. If he were, he wouldn't be selling a wallpaper app.

Yeah it seems like a weird thing to get mad about. No one is forcing anyone to pay this guy for his wallpaper app. Keep watching his videos if you enjoy them or don’t. The wallpaper app seems as inconsequential as his DBrand shilling. I watch his reviews every year and I’ve never bought anything from DBrand lol. Mostly because the products look like shit tbh.

Paying for wallpapers is just not justifiable to me, especially when there are so many sources that offer high quality wallpapers for free, from apps to dedicated forums to simply online search.

It's cool for people with lots of extra cash I guess. I like that 50% of profits go to the artists.

That said, I am certainly not one of those people with extra money to spend on wallpapers. Seems like we're not the target demographic.

Maybe that's part of this guy's problem here. His channel has a broader appeal than the app, so the people outside the app's target demographic got irritated.

See these people as entertainment and not as reviewers, influencers. They are not more than entertainment companies.

Secondly, I don't see him as the dev of the app. I don't know which company dev it and he put his name on it. This brings us to the cut. 50 artist, 25 him, 25 dev company. Without him, the dev company has no chance.

If I'm looking my definition, it looks like a scam.

"curated wallpapers" including random generated stuff, and "shares profits" on a 50/50 basis, for a shitty app developed by what looks like three fivers in a trench coat.

I don't understand why the internet is unable to say "I don't like this app, so I won't pay for it" rather than "I don't like this app, so you're a bad person". Hundreds of people raging over and catastrophising something they never bought or even heard of until now.

Because it's blatant consumer exploitation. Just because the Latin phrase "caveat emptor" exists, doesn't mean that it's a challenge for every scummy youtuber to launch a shite app in order to fleece their subscribers. This is literally the free market in action. The consumers are making their voices heard. I've never understood the mentality of "don't like it, ignore it". No. It actively undermines the work other people on YT have done to legitimize the platform.

Who's being exploited? It's not like the app hides its true nature until you pay. People are upset at the idea of paying it something they don't want to but that's a completely imaginary scenario, those who think it's good will pay for it and those who don't won't. I don't think that justifies calling the guy names and assuming how he must've become (or has always been) a bad person.

I've no idea what you mean by legitimacy of YouTube, but if you think things like this hurt it wouldn't it help to not have a big outrage that makes it reach even more people? Let it have a quiet death and maybe the media will stop creating these weekly how-dare-you-make-a-bad-product dramas

Wow I had no idea the subscription was that much. He mentioned it in a video without saying the price and I still wouldn't do it.

There are infinite list of things and services that are way too expensive for me to even consider buying but I also don't go around complaining about them. Move on guys.. If you want free wallpapers you can try one of the other 9000 free wallpaper apps available. This is recreational outrage.

Disingenuous shill. He's been a famous youtuber for years. He knows how consumers think despite getting all of his shit sent to him for free. There's no way in hell he thought this would work out. "I hear you" Oh do you, Markass Brownlee? You heard all of the noise that people think it's bullshit that you want to sell $50/year subscriptions for jpegs? What kind of philanthropic or based follow up do you have planned to capitalize on all of this newfound SEO?

Youtubers really don't have to answer to anyone. He loses nothing by launching this app, and he gains a whole lot of new eyes and ears coming to his channel. He'll find a way to humanize himself through this and new viewers will click sub because he'll appear super down to Earth. New subs = more sponsorships.

My phone has a camera... i can set photos as wallpapers...

I got a Note 2 at launch and was showing it off at work to people interested in it.

someone asked about the background and where I got it. said I took it and left it at that.

took the pic of the top of my bathroom trashcan while dumping some toxic waste.

pic is the same trashcan now, like me it's a bit dented, dirty, and doesn't open as well as it used to. but, it still works.

Screenshot_20240924-194405_Gallery

No offense but I wouldn't pay $49 for that. Maybe $48.75, but not $49.

$48.99, the lowest I'll go for you my friend

Here’s his wallpaper: MKBSD

Calling them underwhelming is an overstatement. I can find at least 50 better ways to burn my money.

Homie spreads apple propaganda like aids, he's an awful tech influencer

He is quite harsh on Apple for someone who gets exclusive access. In this video he is talking about how nothing has changed, barely considered an update and that the new things dont even come with the phone.

MKBD covers all major manufacturers at this point. Unless you want him to say that Apple sucks, don’t see what the complaint is?

What? He’s in the pocket of all the major OEMs. He’s had zero credibility for years because of this, but he’s never been more deferential to Apple than he has been to Samsung or Google.

I think I would like the idea (and at first this my understanding) if you could buy one wallpaper for $1 (or a pack of few for $3) and the 70-90% would go to the artist. Also app would have to limit tracking to just some basic stuff. I know you can get wallpapers free, but supporting something that looks great on your screen would be a nice option.

Of course subscription service for this is mad.

Haven’t watched him in forever. Has he reached full money grab?

Wasn't he also behind the redline icon pack (which I do actually like) but yeah subscription for something you can easily find your own images or even just ask an AI to make.

Subscriptions aren't something I'll ever buy into software wise and if they are offering an actual service it better be worth the money and give me more than an image.

Yeah, you last part us on point. This is for smaller demographic while the subscribers of his YT channel is more average tech enthusiasts.

Lol screw this dude, never liked him to begin with.

The first time i saw one of his reviews, i thought, "This guy isn't genuine." "That's not an opinion. it's a specification disguised as an opinion."

He gave off real shill vibes, and then i later found out he was an apple simp, and it all came together. He isn't super biased, but he definitely gives more providence to apple products.

His recent review of the apple vr headset was too nice. He said some bad things but qualifies each critisism with a "but i like that" or "but it's not a deal breaker."

Maybe i created a bias against him based on my early impressions, but i just get a bad vibe from him. He doesn't seem to give his opinions.

I will say, though, an exception would be that rabbit thing he reviewed poorly recently and got some backlash from the manufacturer for. I believe he then came back and justified his review. Although everyone was reviewing it poorly so he would give the game away if he said it was good. So perhaps its not an exception... i dont know. Im just freestyling this comment....

Totally on board with you. The only tech dudes I trust are ones that are around Linux space bc they usually tend to call out bs when they see it; mental outlaw, someordinarygamers to name a couple.

I've never liked this guy, he just always felt like a smarmy asshole each time I tried to watch him and he shilled Apple stuff way too hard for my liking. Blocked his channel and several channels that collabed with him and was mostly able to ignore his existence. Doing something shitty like this kinda adds confirmation to my perceptions of him. What an out of touch douche move.