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Comment by criley2 | Hacker News Reader

LTT makes almost all of it's money from floatplane, youtube premium, and youtube advertisements. The "deals" they work with companies are almost entirely outside of the product space they review.

This mud-slinging idea you continue to push (with zero evidence) is contrary to their financials and directly contrary to their business model.

Why on earth would Linus leverage his entire business in debt to buy a huge facility to produce hardware reviews if that would mean "his sponsors" (your salacious claim) would abandon him or force him to change?

It literally doesn't make sense. If they were truly bought and paid for and producing faux-content that is actually advertising, they would have legitimately zero need to spend millions of dollars on hardware testing labs.

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>LTT makes almost all of it's money from floatplane, youtube premium, and youtube advertisements

In the recent video they did on their most profitable videos Linus explicitly said money from YouTube is only a small fraction of their revenue. I don't imagine Floatplane is much of a profit centre either...

Linus did a video on how much money they make from youtube premium/ads and the numbers can get as high as $50k-$100k/video for their most popular streams. It's not nothing. Floatplane is profitable because it's a subscription based system, and that's where the money always is. Hence patreon.

Oh LTT also sells a lot of expensive but high quality merch.

For a company with 50 employees, that is really not all that much.

Salacious is a bit of a salicous word for doubting their reviewer credibility.

I get it. You disagree with me. I hope you are right because he's got quite a bit of power these days.

Salacious is an eminently accurate word for your string of source-less comments describing your feelings about their advertisements under the guise of actual accusations of wrongdoing.

I don't "disagree with you", I dismiss you. I provided an accurate description of their financials and incentives and demonstrated that your salacious claims literally don't make sense.

This is good and normal! We should always dismiss peoples feelings especially when they directly contradict all available evidence. However, I happily await your evidence demonstrating that Linus has been corrupted by a hardware partner into producing devious advertising! We'd all love for you to back your claims up.

Now you're just being rude.

I didn't perceive it as rude but as harsh.

Your opinion is irrelevant because I have dismissed you, freemint.

(See?)

> I hope you are right because he's got quite a bit of power these days.

Oh c'mon. The guy is just a YouTube celeb like hundreds of others and easily disposable, what is this "power" he wields?

On the most recent wan show, his fans located and harassed an ex employee of the new facility he bought because he was mildly perturbed over the state of the building. That's some unchecked power.

Which he told them beforehand not to do, and afterwards chastised them for doing so, being clearly frustrated that his fans would so something like that and make things worse for everyone.

If he wielded the power himself (encouraged that behavior) that's one thing, but fanbases of scale will eventually always have a subset of people that behave poorly like this despite even being directly told not to by the person they're supposedly a fan of...

Exactly. He's powerful.

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