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.
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.
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.
Yes your comment is tautological.
Anish Kapoor strikes again
Maybe it’s inspired by Rothko
Could be, the man was a fucking genius hi created some of my personal favourite paintings.
Was that your point?
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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.
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.
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.
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
Bingo. Major component of persuasive design.
Probably because you can pay for a month and download all the wallpapers and cancel.
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.
$50 a year for wallpapers or I could go to wallhaven and get millions for free?
Use Muzei and either curate your own collection or pull in one of their pre-made ones.
This. Hell you can generate literally endless wallpapers for free.
The “shares its profits with the artists” part is relevant here.
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
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.
Just use a free wallpaper app and pay a random artist 25 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
Fiverr is the worst. They enable abusive clients to find victims, and AI con artists to find marks.
So that sounds exceptionally awful. You have any more info on that?
There’s also this infamous story. And also this one. I recognize that anecdote is not the singular of data, but there’s a pretty substantial paper trail on Fiverr.
But that’s the best type of artist
… why are they always so goddamn hot.
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.
okay, cool, but I am going to assume you don’t speak for all artists.
No one speaks for all X.
The wallpapers are nice but the side is hideous and unusable.
Which side?
Typo, my bed
(intentional this time, it’s late)
Good night😴
the website is hideous and unusable
huh?
Used it on desktop, had to create account, even after that kept giving me errors that i need an account…
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.
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
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!”
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.
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.
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.
No offense but I wouldn’t pay $49 for that. Maybe $48.75, but not $49.
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.
That just about sums it up.
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.
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 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?
If what others have said about there being a solid orange wallpaper, I have questions about the art
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.
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.
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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.
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
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.
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.
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.
Here’s his wallpaper: MKBSD
Calling them underwhelming is an overstatement. I can find at least 50 better ways to burn my money.
This professional guy shares handmade wallpaper for free.
looks like shit thanks 🙏👍
